Google Cloud Platform (GCP) is a suite of

cloud computing Cloud computing is "a paradigm for enabling network access to a scalable and elastic pool of shareable physical or virtual resources with self-service provisioning and administration on-demand," according to International Organization for ...

services offered by

Google Google LLC (, ) is an American multinational corporation and technology company focusing on online advertising, search engine technology, cloud computing, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, consumer electronics, and artificial ...

that provides a series of modular cloud services including computing,

data storage Data storage is the recording (storing) of information (data) in a storage medium. Handwriting, phonographic recording, magnetic tape, and optical discs are all examples of storage media. Biological molecules such as RNA and DNA are con ...

data analytics Analytics is the systematic computational analysis of data or statistics. It is used for the discovery, interpretation, and communication of meaningful patterns in data, which also falls under and directly relates to the umbrella term, data sci ...

, and

machine learning Machine learning (ML) is a field of study in artificial intelligence concerned with the development and study of Computational statistics, statistical algorithms that can learn from data and generalise to unseen data, and thus perform Task ( ...

, alongside a set of management tools. It runs on the same infrastructure that Google uses internally for its end-user products, such as

Google Search Google Search (also known simply as Google or Google.com) is a search engine operated by Google. It allows users to search for information on the World Wide Web, Web by entering keywords or phrases. Google Search uses algorithms to analyze an ...

Gmail Gmail is the email service provided by Google. it had 1.5 billion active user (computing), users worldwide, making it the largest email service in the world. It also provides a webmail interface, accessible through a web browser, and is also ...

, and Google Docs, according to Verma et al. Registration requires a credit card or bank account details. Google Cloud Platform provides infrastructure as a service, platform as a service, and

serverless computing Serverless computing is "a cloud service category in which the customer can use different cloud capability types without the customer having to provision, deploy and manage either hardware or software resources, other than providing customer appli ...

environments. In April 2008, Google announced App Engine, a platform for developing and hosting web applications in Google-managed

data center A data center is a building, a dedicated space within a building, or a group of buildings used to house computer systems and associated components, such as telecommunications and storage systems. Since IT operations are crucial for busines ...

s, which was the first cloud computing service from the company. The service became generally available in November 2011. Since the announcement of App Engine, Google added multiple cloud services to the platform. Google Cloud Platform is a part of Google Cloud, which includes the Google Cloud Platform public cloud infrastructure, as well as

Google Workspace Google Workspace (formerly G Suite, formerly Google Apps) is a collection of cloud computing, Productivity software, productivity and Collaborative software, collaboration tools, software and products developed and marketed by Google. It con ...

(G Suite), enterprise versions of Android and

ChromeOS ChromeOS, sometimes styled as chromeOS and formerly styled as Chrome OS, is an operating system designed and developed by Google. It is derived from the open-source operating system and uses the Google Chrome web browser as its principal user ...

, and

application programming interface An application programming interface (API) is a connection between computers or between computer programs. It is a type of software Interface (computing), interface, offering a service to other pieces of software. A document or standard that des ...

s (APIs) for machine learning and enterprise mapping services. Since at least 2022, Google's official materials have stated that "Google Cloud" is the new name for "Google Cloud Platform," which may cause naming confusion.

Challenges

Like other

solutions, applications hosted on Google Cloud Platform are subject to the fallacies of distributed computing, a series of misconceptions that can lead to significant issues in software development and deployment.

Products

Google lists over 100 products under the Google Cloud brand. Some of the key services are listed below.

Compute

* App Engine – Platform as a Service to deploy applications developed with

Java Java is one of the Greater Sunda Islands in Indonesia. It is bordered by the Indian Ocean to the south and the Java Sea (a part of Pacific Ocean) to the north. With a population of 156.9 million people (including Madura) in mid 2024, proje ...

, PHP, Node.js, Python, C#,

.Net The .NET platform (pronounced as "''dot net"'') is a free and open-source, managed code, managed computer software framework for Microsoft Windows, Windows, Linux, and macOS operating systems. The project is mainly developed by Microsoft emplo ...

Ruby Ruby is a pinkish-red-to-blood-red-colored gemstone, a variety of the mineral corundum ( aluminium oxide). Ruby is one of the most popular traditional jewelry gems and is very durable. Other varieties of gem-quality corundum are called sapph ...

and Go programming languages. * Compute Engine – Infrastructure as a Service to run

Microsoft Windows Windows is a Product lining, product line of Proprietary software, proprietary graphical user interface, graphical operating systems developed and marketed by Microsoft. It is grouped into families and subfamilies that cater to particular sec ...

and

Linux Linux ( ) is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an kernel (operating system), operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically package manager, pac ...

virtual machines. * Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) or GKE on-prem offered as part of Anthos platform – Containers as a Service based on

Kubernetes Kubernetes (), also known as K8s is an open-source software, open-source OS-level virtualization, container orchestration (computing), orchestration system for automating software deployment, scaling, and management. Originally designed by Googl ...

. * Cloud Functions – Functions as a Service to run event-driven code written in Node.js, Java, Python, or Go. * Cloud Run – Compute execution environment based on Knative. Offered as Cloud Run (fully managed) or as Cloud Run for Anthos. Currently supports GCP, AWS and VMware management.

Storage and databases

* Cloud Storage – Object storage with integrated edge caching to store

unstructured data Unstructured data (or unstructured information) is information that either does not have a pre-defined data model or is not organized in a pre-defined manner. Unstructured information is typically plain text, text-heavy, but may contain data such ...

. * Cloud SQL – Database as a Service based on

MySQL MySQL () is an Open-source software, open-source relational database management system (RDBMS). Its name is a combination of "My", the name of co-founder Michael Widenius's daughter My, and "SQL", the acronym for Structured Query Language. A rel ...

PostgreSQL PostgreSQL ( ) also known as Postgres, is a free and open-source software, free and open-source relational database management system (RDBMS) emphasizing extensibility and SQL compliance. PostgreSQL features transaction processing, transactions ...

and

Microsoft SQL Server Microsoft SQL Server is a proprietary relational database management system developed by Microsoft using Structured Query Language (SQL, often pronounced "sequel"). As a database server, it is a software product with the primary function of ...

. * Cloud Bigtable – Managed

NoSQL NoSQL (originally meaning "Not only SQL" or "non-relational") refers to a type of database design that stores and retrieves data differently from the traditional table-based structure of relational databases. Unlike relational databases, which ...

database service. * Cloud Spanner – Horizontally scalable, strongly consistent, relational database service. * Cloud Datastore – NoSQL database for web and mobile applications. *Persistent Disk – Block storage for Compute Engine virtual machines. *Cloud Memorystore – Managed in-memory data store based on

Redis Redis (; Remote Dictionary Server) is an in-memory key–value database, used as a distributed cache and message broker, with optional durability. Because it holds all data in memory and because of its design, Redis offers low- latency reads ...

and Memcached. *Local

SSD A solid-state drive (SSD) is a type of solid-state storage device that uses Integrated circuit, integrated circuits to store data persistence (computer science), persistently. It is sometimes called semiconductor storage device, solid-stat ...

: High-performance, transient, local block storage. *Filestore: High-performance file storage for Google Cloud users. *AlloyDB: Fully managed PostgreSQL database service.

Networking

Google Cloud Network Topology - External Load Balancer Architecture

* VPC – Virtual Private Cloud for managing the software defined network of cloud resources. * Cloud Load Balancing – Software-defined, managed service for load balancing the traffic. * Cloud Armor – Web application firewall to protect workloads from DDoS attacks. * Cloud CDN –

Content Delivery Network A content delivery network (CDN) or content distribution network is a geographically distributed network of proxy servers and their data centers. The goal is to provide high availability and performance ("speed") by distributing the service spat ...

based on Google's globally distributed edge points of presence. * Cloud Interconnect – Service to connect a data center with Google Cloud Platform * Cloud DNS – Managed, authoritative DNS hosting service running on the same infrastructure as Google. * Network Service Tiers – Option to choose Premium vs Standard network tier for higher-performing network.

Big data

* BigQuery – Scalable, managed enterprise

data warehouse In computing, a data warehouse (DW or DWH), also known as an enterprise data warehouse (EDW), is a system used for Business intelligence, reporting and data analysis and is a core component of business intelligence. Data warehouses are central Re ...

for analytics. * Cloud Dataflow – Managed service based on Apache Beam for stream and batch data processing. * Cloud Data Fusion – A managed ETL service based on the Open Source Cask Data Application Platform. * Dataproc –

Big data Big data primarily refers to data sets that are too large or complex to be dealt with by traditional data processing, data-processing application software, software. Data with many entries (rows) offer greater statistical power, while data with ...

platform for running Apache Hadoop and Apache Spark jobs. * Cloud Composer – Managed workflow orchestration service built on Apache Airflow. * Cloud Datalab – Tool for data exploration,

analysis Analysis (: analyses) is the process of breaking a complex topic or substance into smaller parts in order to gain a better understanding of it. The technique has been applied in the study of mathematics and logic since before Aristotle (38 ...

, visualization and machine learning. This is a fully managed Jupyter Notebook service. * Cloud Dataprep – Data service based on Trifacta to visually explore, clean, and prepare data for analysis. * Cloud Pub/Sub – Scalable event ingestion service based on

message queue In computer science, message queues and mailboxes are software-engineering components typically used for inter-process communication (IPC), or for inter- thread communication within the same process. They use a queue for messaging – the ...

s. * Looker Studio –

Business intelligence Business intelligence (BI) consists of strategies, methodologies, and technologies used by enterprises for data analysis and management of business information. Common functions of BI technologies include Financial reporting, reporting, online an ...

tool to visualize data through dashboards and reports. * Looker – Business intelligence platform.

Cloud AI

* Cloud AutoML – Service to train and deploy custom machine learning models. As of September 2018, the service is in Beta. * Cloud TPU – Accelerators used by Google to train machine learning models. * Cloud Machine Learning Engine – Managed service for training and building machine learning models based on mainstream frameworks. * Cloud Talent Solution (formerly Cloud Job Discovery) – Service based on Google's search and machine learning capabilities for the recruiting ecosystem. * Dialogflow Enterprise – Development environment based on Google's machine learning for building conversational interfaces. * Cloud Natural Language – Text analysis service based on Google

Deep Learning Deep learning is a subset of machine learning that focuses on utilizing multilayered neural networks to perform tasks such as classification, regression, and representation learning. The field takes inspiration from biological neuroscience a ...

models. * Cloud Speech-to-Text – Speech to text conversion service based on machine learning. * Cloud Text-to-Speech – Text to speech conversion service based on machine learning. * Cloud Translation API – Service to dynamically translate between thousands of available language pairs. * Cloud Vision API –

Image analysis Image analysis or imagery analysis is the extraction of meaningful information from images; mainly from digital images by means of digital image processing techniques. Image analysis tasks can be as simple as reading barcode, bar coded tags or a ...

service based on machine learning. * Cloud Video Intelligence – Video analysis service based on machine learning.

Management tools

* Operations suite (formerly Stackdriver ) – Monitoring, logging, tracing, and diagnostics for applications on Google Cloud Platform. * Cloud Deployment Manager - Tool to deploy Google Cloud Platform resources defined in templates created in YAML, Python or Jinja2. * Cloud Console – Web interface to manage Google Cloud Platform resources. * Cloud Shell – Browser-based shell command-line access to manage Google Cloud Platform resources. * Cloud Console Mobile App – Android and iOS application to manage Google Cloud Platform resources. * Cloud APIs –

API An application programming interface (API) is a connection between computers or between computer programs. It is a type of software interface, offering a service to other pieces of software. A document or standard that describes how to build ...

s to programmatically access Google Cloud Platform resources

Identity and security

* Cloud Identity – Single sign-on (SSO) service based on SAML 2.0 and OpenID. * Cloud IAM – Identity & Access Management (IAM) service for defining policies based on role-based access control. * Cloud Identity-Aware Proxy – Service to control access to cloud applications running on Google Cloud Platform without using a VPN. * Cloud Data Loss Prevention API – Service to automatically discover, classify, and redact sensitive data. * Security Key Enforcement – Two-step verification service based on a security key. * Cloud Key Management Service – Cloud-hosted key management service integrated with IAM and audit logging. * Cloud Resource Manager – Service to manage resources by project, folder, and organization based on the hierarchy. * Cloud Security Command Center – Security and data risk platform for data and services running in Google Cloud Platform. * Cloud Security Scanner – Automated vulnerability scanning service for applications deployed in App Engine. * Access Transparency – Near real-time audit logs providing visibility to Google Cloud Platform administrators. * VPC Service Controls – Service to manage security perimeters for sensitive data in Google Cloud Platform services.

Internet of things (IoT)

* Cloud IoT Core – Secure device connection and management service for

Internet of Things Internet of things (IoT) describes devices with sensors, processing ability, software and other technologies that connect and exchange data with other devices and systems over the Internet or other communication networks. The IoT encompasse ...

. *Edge TPU – Purpose-built ASIC designed to run inference at the edge. As of September 2018, this product is in private beta. *Cloud IoT Edge – Brings AI to the

edge computing Edge computing is a distributed computing model that brings computation and data storage closer to the sources of data. More broadly, it refers to any design that pushes computation physically closer to a user, so as to reduce the Latency (engineer ...

layer.

API platform

* Maps Platform – APIs for maps, routes, and places based on Google Maps. * Apigee API Platform – Lifecycle management platform to design, secure, deploy, monitor, and scale APIs. * API Monetization – Tool for API providers to create revenue models, reports, payment gateways, and developer portal integrations. * Developer Portal – Self-service platform for developers to publish and manage APIs. * API Analytics – Service to analyze API-driven programs through monitoring, measuring, and managing APIs. * Apigee Sense – Enables API security by identifying and alerting administrators to suspicious API behaviors. * Cloud Endpoints – An

NGINX (pronounced "engine x" , stylized as NGINX or nginx) is a web server that can also be used as a reverse proxy, load balancer, mail proxy and HTTP cache. The software was created by Russian developer Igor Sysoev and publicly released in 20 ...

-based proxy to deploy and manage APIs. * Service Infrastructure – A set of foundational services for building Google Cloud products.

Regions and zones

A region is a specific geographical location where users can deploy cloud resources. Each region is an independent geographic area that consists of zones. A zone is a deployment area for Google Cloud Platform resources within a region. Zones should be considered a single failure domain within a region. Most regions have three zones. , Google Cloud Platform is available in 40 regions and 121 zones. This is a list of those regions and zones:

Similarity to services by other cloud service providers

For those familiar with other notable cloud service providers, a comparison of similar services may be helpful in understanding Google Cloud Platform's offerings.

Timeline

* April 2008 – Google App Engine announced in preview * May 2010 – Google Cloud Storage launched * May 2010 – Google BigQuery and Prediction API announced in preview * October 2011 – Google Cloud SQL is announced in preview * June 2012 – Google Compute Engine is launched in preview * May 2013 – Google Compute Engine is released to GA * August 2013 - Cloud Storage begins automatically encrypting each Storage object's data and

metadata Metadata (or metainformation) is "data that provides information about other data", but not the content of the data itself, such as the text of a message or the image itself. There are many distinct types of metadata, including: * Descriptive ...

under the 128-bit

Advanced Encryption Standard The Advanced Encryption Standard (AES), also known by its original name Rijndael (), is a specification for the encryption of electronic data established by the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in 2001. AES is a variant ...

(AES-128), and each encryption key is itself encrypted with a regularly rotated set of master keys * February 2014 – Google Cloud SQL becomes GA * May 2014 – Stackdriver is acquired by Google * June 2014 – Kubernetes is announced as an open source container manager * June 2014 – Cloud Dataflow is announced in preview * October 2014 – Google acquires Firebase * November 2014 – Alpha release Google Kubernetes Engine (formerly Container Engine) is announced * January 2015 – Google Cloud Monitoring based on Stackdriver goes into Beta * March 2015 – Google Cloud Pub/Sub becomes available in Beta * April 2015 – Google Cloud DNS becomes generally available * April 2015 – Google Dataflow launched in beta * July 2015 – Google releases v1 of Kubernetes; Hands it over to The Cloud Native Computing Foundation * August 2015 – Google Cloud Dataflow, Google Cloud Pub/Sub, Google Kubernetes Engine, and Deployment Manager graduate to GA * November 2015 – Bebop is acquired, and Diane Greene joins Google * February 2016 – Google Cloud Functions becomes available in Alpha * September 2016 – Apigee, a provider of application programming interface (API) management company, is acquired by Google * September 2016 – Stackdriver becomes generally available * November 2016 – Qwiklabs, an EdTech company is acquired by Google * February 2017 – Cloud Spanner, highly available, globally-distributed database is released into Beta * March 2017 – Google acquires Kaggle, world's largest community of data scientists and machine learning enthusiasts * April 2017 – MIT professor Andrew Sutherland breaks the record for the largest ever Compute Engine cluster with 220,000 cores on Preemptible VMs. * May 2017 – Google Cloud IoT Core is launched in Beta * November 2017 – Google Kubernetes Engine gets certified by the CNCF * February 2018 – Google Cloud IoT Core becomes generally available * February 2018 – Google announces its intent to acquire Xively * February 2018 – Cloud TPUs, ML accelerators for Tensorflow, become available in Beta * May 2018 – Google Cloud Memorystore becomes available in Beta * April 2019 – Google Cloud Run (fully managed) Beta release * April 2019 – Google Anthos announced * November 2019 – Google Cloud Run (fully managed) General availability release * March 2020 – Due to the

COVID-19 pandemic The COVID-19 pandemic (also known as the coronavirus pandemic and COVID pandemic), caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), began with an disease outbreak, outbreak of COVID-19 in Wuhan, China, in December ...

, Google Cloud postponed the online streaming version of its Google Cloud Next mega-conference, two weeks after it canceled the in-person version. * October 2020 – Google Cloud announced that it will become a block producer candidate for the EOS network and EOS.IO protocol. Currently the top block producers are

cryptocurrency A cryptocurrency (colloquially crypto) is a digital currency designed to work through a computer network that is not reliant on any central authority, such as a government or bank, to uphold or maintain it. Individual coin ownership record ...

exchanges like OKEx and Binance. * February 2021 – Google Kubernetes Engine Autopilot introduced. * May 2021 – Vertex AI announced at Google.io * June 2021 – In 2021, Apple was Google Cloud's biggest customer. * April 2022 – MobiledgeX acquired and joins Google Cloud. * March 2023 – Google brings generative AI capabilities to Google Cloud. * May 2024 Google Cloud partnered with Airtel.

Public Customers

Customers announced in 2023 include:

Kingfisher plc Kingfisher plc is a British Multinational corporation, multinational retailing company headquartered in London, England. It has over 1,300 stores in nine countries, and its brands include B&Q, Castorama, Brico Dépôt and Screwfix. Kingfisher i ...

, the Government of Kuwait, Deutsche Börse Group,

Unity Technologies Unity Software Inc. (doing business as Unity Technologies) is an American video game software development company based in San Francisco. It was founded in Denmark in 2004 as Over the Edge Entertainment and changed its name in 2007. Unity Techn ...

Uber Uber Technologies, Inc. is an American multinational transportation company that provides Ridesharing company, ride-hailing services, courier services, food delivery, and freight transport. It is headquartered in San Francisco, California, a ...

, FanCode, and Daimler.

References

External links

* {{Google LLC Cloud Platform Cloud computing providers Cloud infrastructure Cloud platforms Web services Internet properties established in 2011