GCP Services
By Noha Bakry
GCP Services
• Google Cloud Services is a set of Computing, Networking, Storage, Big
Data, Machine Learning, and Management services offered by Google
which runs on the same cloud infrastructure that Google uses
internally for YouTube, Gmail, and other end-user products.
GCP Services List
1.Computing Service
2.Storage and Database Service
3.Networking Service
4.Big Data Service
5.Machine Learning Service
6.Identity and Security Service
7.Management and Developer Tools
Computing Service
• Google Cloud provides users with the facility of computing and
hosting where you can choose to do the following:
• Work in a serverless environment
• Use a managed application platform
• Build a cloud-based infrastructure to have maximum control and flexibility
• Leverage container technologies to achieve maximum flexibility
Computing Service
1- Compute Engine
• Compute engine is a compute service of Google Cloud.
• It is an IaaS (Infrastructure As A Service) service that provides virtual
machines (VMs) hosted on Google’s infrastructure.
• Users can perform any tasks after building a compute engine.
2- App Engine
• The App Engine is a PaaS (Platform As A Service) offering of Google
Cloud used for building scalable web applications and IoT backends.
• It scales applications automatically depending upon the traffic
received.
• It provides users with built-in services and APIs, such as Datastores,
NoSQL, and a user authentication API.
3- Cloud Function
• It is a function as a service (FaaS) .
• computing solution allowing users to create microservices (small,
single-purpose functions) that respond to cloud events without the
need for an explicitly managed server.
• It can be written using JavaScript, Python 3, Go, or Java.
4- Google Kubernetes Engine/ Container
Engine
• It is a strong Cluster Manager and balanced system for running Docker
containers.
• Kubernetes Engine schedules your containers into the cluster, keeps
them healthy, and manages them automatically based on the
requirements defined by the user.
5- Google Cloud Container Registry
• The container registry is a private Docker repository to
manage Docker Images and works with the popular continuous
delivery systems.
• Customers can decide who can access what with fine-grained access
control.
Google Cloud Storage And Database
• Google Cloud Platform (GCP) delivers various storage and database
service offerings that remove much of the burden of building and
managing storage and infrastructure
Google Storage And Database Options
• Google Cloud offers 9 storage and database options namely:
• Cloud Storage
• Cloud SQL
• Cloud Spanner
• Cloud Datastore
• Cloud Bigtable
• Persistent Disk
• Cloud Firestore (Firestore & Filestore are both two different types)
• Google Cloud Filestore
• BigQuery
Data Types: Structured & Unstructured
Data
The Google storage and database services can be put into 2 categories:
1.) Structured Data
• If the data can be organized in a structural format like rows and columns then it
is known as structured data. Example: Financial data, logs, etc.
• From the various offerings of Google Storage service, structured data can be
stored in Cloud SQL, Cloud Spanner, Cloud Datastore, Cloud Bigtable, Cloud
BigQuery, and Persistent disk.
• 2.) Unstructured Data
• It is a sequence of bytes that could be from a video, image, or document. The
data is stored as objects in buckets and no insight can be gained from
unstructured data.
• Google Cloud Storage and Cloud Firestore are used to store unstructured data in
the Google Cloud Platform.
For farther reading about structured and
unstructured data
• https://k21academy.com/microsoft-azure/dp-900/structured-data-vs-
unstructured-data-vs-semi-structured-data/
Google Cloud Storage
Category: Object Storage, Archival Storage
• It provides some interesting features such as object versioning or fine-grain
permissions (per object or bucket), that can make development easy and help
reduce operational overheads.
• It also serves as the foundation of several different services.
• Cloud Storage lets you choose among four different types of storage classes:
regional, Multi-regional, Nearline, and Coldline.
• All of the storage classes are accessed using the Cloud Storage API, and they
all offer millisecond access times.
Cloud Firestore
Category: Mobile App Services, non-relational
• Cloud Firestore is a flexible, scalable database for mobile, web, and
server development from Firebase and Google Cloud. Like Firebase
Realtime Database, it keeps the data in-sync across client apps
through real-time listeners and offers offline support for mobile and
web so users can build responsive apps that work regardless of
network latency or Internet connectivity.
Google Cloud Filestore
Category: File Storage
• Google Cloud Filestore is widely used when it comes to performing
heavy machine learning tasks, media processing, rendering, etc due to
the high throughput it is highly preferred. It is generally not
considered as a storage option, but a temporary drive for performing
high read intensive tasks.
Persistent Disk
Category: Block Storage
• Persistent disks are durable network storage devices that the
instances can access like physical disks on a desktop or a server.
• The data on each persistent disk is distributed across several physical
disks.
• The physical disks and the data distribution are managed by the
Compute Engine to ensure redundancy and optimal performance.
Cloud SQL
Category: Relational Database service
• Cloud SQL is a fully-managed database service that helps in setting up,
maintain, manage, and administerate relational databases on the
Google Cloud Platform.
Cloud Spanner
Category: Relational Database service
• Cloud Spanner is a fully managed, mission-critical, relational database
service.
• It offers transactional consistency at a global scale, schemas, SQL, and
automatic, synchronous replication for high availability.
Cloud Bigtable
Category: Non-relational Database service
• Cloud Bigtable is Google’s NoSQL Big Data database service. It is the
same database powering many Google services, like Search, Analytics,
Maps, and Gmail.
Cloud Datastore
Category: Database service
• Cloud Datastore is a highly-scalable NoSQL database.
• it uses a distributed architecture to automatically manage scaling.
• The queries scale with the size of the result set and not the size of
the data set.
BigQuery
Category: Data Warehouse
• BigQuery is a fully-managed, serverless data warehouse that enables
scalable analysis over petabytes of data.
• It is a Platform as a Service (PaaS) that supports querying using ANSI
SQL. and also has built-in machine learning capabilities.
