Google Cloud Basics

Google Cloud Platform (GCP) is a suite of cloud computing services offered by Google. It provides a range of services including computing, storage, networking, big data, machine learning, and the Internet of Things (IoT), as well as cloud management, security and developer tools.

Core GCP Service Categories:

1. Compute - Compute Engine (VMs), App Engine (PaaS), GKE (Kubernetes), Cloud Run (serverless containers), Cloud Functions (serverless).

2. Storage - Cloud Storage (object storage), Cloud SQL (managed RDBMS), Cloud Spanner (global relational DB), Bigtable (NoSQL), Firestore/Datastore (document DB).

3. Networking - VPC, Cloud Load Balancing, Cloud CDN, Cloud DNS, Cloud Interconnect.

4. Big Data & Analytics - BigQuery (data warehouse), Dataflow (stream/batch processing), Pub/Sub (messaging), Dataproc (managed Spark/Hadoop).

5. AI & ML - Vertex AI, AutoML, AI Platform, Vision API, Natural Language API, Translation API.

The below example shows how to use the Google Cloud SDK (gcloud) to set up a project and deploy a simple Hello World app to Google App Engine.

It gives the following output,

Services to deploy:
descriptor: app.yaml
source: /home/user/my-app
target project: my-gcp-project
target service: default
target version: 20240101t120000
target url: https://my-gcp-project.uc.r.appspot.com

Do you want to continue (Y/n)? Y
Deployed service [default] to [https://my-gcp-project.uc.r.appspot.com]

Key GCP Concepts:

Projects - The fundamental organizing unit in GCP. All resources belong to a project.

Regions & Zones - GCP has 35+ regions and 106+ zones worldwide for deploying resources close to your users.

IAM - Identity and Access Management controls who can do what on which GCP resources.

Billing - Pay-as-you-go model with sustained use discounts and committed use discounts available.