Cloud computing is an exciting and rapidly evolving technology. In a nutshell, cloud computing is delivering computing services over the internet. These services include networking, storage, databases, software analytics, and intelligence. With so many businesses already using public clouds or planning to use them, cloud providers such as Amazon, Microsoft, and Google constantly compete to win and retain customers.
In this article, you'll learn more about the Google Cloud Platform, and you'll find out how one of the world's largest technology companies is dealing with fierce competition.
What is Google Cloud Platform?
Google Cloud is the umbrella term that encapsulates everything that Google has to do with the cloud. GCP is a part of Google Cloud, and it's the platform, as the name suggests, that customers can utilize and run their services on.
First launched in 2008, GCP's app engine helped customers launch web applications online. Google has developed and managed to acquire products over the years that improve the user experience on its cloud platform.
Google Cloud Platform, also known as GCP, is a platform for engineers, developers, scientists, etc., that enables them to develop applications and build data streams and processes using tools that Google uses. Google basically uses this platform to develop their own services, such as Gmail and Drive, and also offers these services to their clients to enable them to build and deploy their own applications. The platform provides a number of management tools that are essential to businesses that need to store or analyze large amounts of data and will benefit from these services.
In addition to the various management tools available on the Google Cloud Platform, the company offers a variety of cloud functionalities and features such as cloud storage, data analytics, developer options, artificial intelligence, and advanced machine learning. Many small and large businesses are increasingly utilizing the Google Cloud Platform because it engages and secures things at a low cost. The Google Cloud Platform's popularity stems from its extensive optimization and other benefits.
GCP Infrastructure
The Google Cloud Platform is a collection of physical and virtual resources that are stored in Google data centers all over the world. These resources include computers, hard drives, and virtual machines. Since they are accessed via the Internet, developers are not required to manage or own these physical resources. You can combine these services when building your application on GCP. This will give you the needed infrastructure, and you can then add your own code to address the problems you want to solve.
The infrastructure Google provides in GCP is the same that Google uses in several of its own applications like Search, Maps, Mail, and YouTube.
This means that customers benefit directly from Google's wealth of knowledge, experience, and ingenuity. Thus, by leveraging this, Google has created a platform with high scalability and reliability. Google has built data centers around the world to distribute its physical resources. Each data center location is part of a region. and each region is made up of zones that are isolated from one another.
You can learn more about Google Cloud's infrastructure here.
Why Use Google Cloud Platform?
Now that you have a brief idea of what Google Cloud Platform is let's understand why one should consider using it.
GCP has better pricing than its competitors, and it's highly scalable. This is because it uses auto-scaling to automatically adjust the sum of virtual machine instances that are hosting your application. This allows your application to adapt to varying levels of traffic. GCP offers custom machine types that will enable you to create compute engine virtual machines with optimal amounts of virtual CPU and memory.
Google Cloud's IoT code, a fully managed service, simplifies and secures connecting, managing, and ingesting data from distributed devices. Google Cloud APIs give you the option of automating your workflows by using your favorite programming language. Google's cloud API ecosystem consists of compute API, storage API, big data API, text API, networking API, and many others.
Google provides fully managed smart analytics solutions. The multi-cloud analytics platform lets everyone gain insights while eliminating scaling, performance, and cost constraints. Big data analytics use real-time insights and data apps to drive decisions and innovation with cloud AI. GCP cloud functions are the easiest way to run your code in the cloud.
GCP offers hundreds of services, from data analysis to compute power. You can take on everything yourself, your code, your configurations, your servers, and your network, or you can go for a more managed service like Kubernetes or App Engine. This is where all you know is that you've got an app, you deploy it, and then GCP handles it all for you.
GCP is essentially a good idea for any business that uses computers, and if you have processes on-premise that are taking up space or costing you money and you want to move them to the cloud, GCP is a fantastic option.
In the near future, every business could be a data and computing business, which is very exciting. Whether you're running a process locally on your laptop at home or a multi-regional, multi-hyperscale deployment, GCP can accommodate any of those processes because it's so scalable. A small business just starting out or one with years of experience and systems in place can benefit from using the cloud, especially Google Cloud.
The Main Competitors of Google Cloud Platform
In a highly competitive landscape, Google Cloud competes with other public cloud providers such as Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure.
In 2006, Amazon Web Services (AWS) debuted as a public cloud service. With its wide range of tools and services, it has the largest market share by appealing to diverse customers, including individuals, large corporations, and government agencies.
The Microsoft Azure cloud service was introduced in 2010 and has proven particularly appealing for Microsoft-based environments. Workloads can now be moved from data centers to Azure, and hybrid environments can be built. Azure is the second-largest public cloud and is primarily used by large enterprises.
Google Cloud Platform is the smallest of the three major public cloud services. However, Google Cloud has a solid reputation for its compute, network, big data, machine learning, and artificial intelligence services. In recent years, Google has reduced the gap with its main competitors. More information about the strategic moves Google made to achieve this can be found in the following section.
How Thomas Kurian Made Google Cloud a Leader in the Industry
Diane Greene announced on November 16, 2018, that Thomas Kurian would succeed her as head of Google's cloud division.
Greene's resignation came as no surprise to people in the industry. Greene faced backlash from Google employees after supplying the US military with artificial intelligence tools to aid drone attacks earlier that year. Greene quickly announced that the contract would not be renewed. However, the incident played a significant role in Google's decision to withdraw from the bidding for a $10 billion military cloud computing contract. Both events significantly hampered Google's pursuit of cloud leaders Amazon and Microsoft.
What surprised experts was the choice of Thomas Kurian. Kurian, Oracle's former President of Product Development, had just left the company after 22 years. According to Bloomberg, Kurian and Oracle CTO/Executive Chairman Larry Ellison disagreed on Oracle's cloud vision. Many predicted that Kurian's vision would face cultural resistance at Google. For years, Google prioritized innovation and a consumer-driven/engineering-oriented approach, which was diametrically opposed to Kurian's vision of B2B and storage/website hosting.
Kurian revealed his plan in his first public appearance in February 2019. He stated that Google would increase its investment in sales and technical talent for its cloud business. In addition, he announced the launch of Anthos. This platform enables customers to run applications on-premise, in the Google Cloud, as well as in other cloud providers such as Microsoft Azure and AWS. He also stated that Google would launch its "first integrated open source ecosystem," allowing customers to use open source specialists such as DataStax and MongoDB.
Kurian's new strategy began to pay dividends after only one year. Google Cloud generated $8.9 billion in revenue in 2019, a 50% increase over 2018. Furthermore, Google Cloud-certified partners increased by 300%, and partner-sourced revenue increased by 195%.
This expansion continued during the COVID-19 pandemic. Google Cloud's revenue had more than doubled by July 2021. Furthermore, Google increased its market share in infrastructure cloud services (9% compared to 7% when Kurian took the helm).
Although Google is still not at the level of Amazon or Microsoft, it is on its way, largely thanks to Kurian's leadership.
If you would like to deploy a highly scalable system for your business using a trusted cloud provider such as Google, let us know.
