Google Cloud first impressions

I have been working on GCP for the last five months. In this blog post I share what I have learned and observations.

Global network

Compared to some other public clouds, GCP has a global fibre backed network. As a result of this the GCP VPC (virtual private cloud) is a global resource that spans across regions!

Cloud Native services

As is well known Google were the creators of what is now Kubernetes (Borg project). GCP has a plethora of services that support containers in different forms. To a name a few:

GKE

Google Kubernetes engine. A fully managed K8s implementation. Some really interesting features include:

• Google Auto pilot. A opinionated bootstrapped production ready GKE cluster that fulfills all the Kubernetes hardening and best practices you spent hours watching videos about!! Thanks GCP engineering team
• Automatic node self healing.
• Latest versions of Kubernetes supported

Cloud run

If you have worked with AWS or Azure, Cloud run is a serverless container platform for use cases that do not require the functionalities of a orchestrator such as K8s. Think stateless applications. Some interesting points are:

• Out of the box support of Knative
• Support of build packs. Build containers without a Dockerfile

Data

GCP has a plethora of data focused tools. I have been working with a team using BigQuery.

BigQuery

BigQuery is a PaaS data warehouse with some really interesting features:

• Built-in ML Integration
• Free sandbox access
• Real time analytics through stream insertion API
• Federated queries accessing external data sources

A developers cloud

To summarise GCP has many services development teams can harness for developing Cloud native and Data intensive applications There is a learning curve as with any platform but the key benefits for your development teams include:

• Strong services for developing container based and data driven applications
• Ease of adoption for engineering teams with strong skills in automation, scripting, use of containers and DevOps practices
• Competitive pricing on many services (per second billing) for experimentation

In my next blog I will be exploring Google Cloud functions with some Python code.