Brief notes on Google Cloud Computing Services

Fun fact: GCP in total has almost 40 services that meet variety of computing, storage and network needs.

IaaS (Infrastructure as a service)

Example - VMs. Greatest control of all the computing services. Flexible in terms on OS, packages to install and backup & maintenance operations.

In GCP, these products are called Compute Engine.

Paas (Platform as a service)

Provides runtime environment to execute application without the need to manage underlying servers, networks or storage systems.

Offerings such as App Engine and Cloud Functions fall in this category.

Computing Resources

Compute Engine

• IaaS offering. allows to create VMs, attach persistent storage to those VMs, and make use of other GCP services such as Cloud storage.

• VMs - abstractions of physical servers. GCP uses security hardened version of KVM (Kernel Virtual Machine) hypervisor - provides virtualization on Linux systems running on x86 hardware.

• You can pick and choose the configuration just like an actual hardware - things like OS, Disk capacity, GPU

Kubernetes Engine

• Containerized applications on a cluster of servers. Containers are lightweight VMs.

• Monitors the health of servers in cluster and replaces the containers if one of them goes down for any reason. (Self healing property)

App Engine

• PaaS offering - developers don't need to worry about configuring VMs - instead it just gives them a platform with popular languages in the environment.

• Available in 2 types - standard and flexible

Cloud Functions

• Lightweight, event-driven processing.

• piece of code or a function that runs in response to an event, like a file being uploaded to cloud storage. This code must be short-running.

• Often used for calling other third party APIs.

• Serverless product - No configuration needed and scales automatically depending on the load.