Step 1 from series aim to understand Google Cloud.

What is Cloud computing?

Cloud computing is a way of using information technology that has following five equally important traits:

\> Customer get computing resources that are on-demand and self-service

\> Customers get access to those resources over internet, from anywhere

\> The provider of those resources allocates them to users of that pool

\> The resources are elastic, which means; they can increase and decrease as needed

\> Customers pay only for what they use or reserve as they go

IT infrastructure

An infrastructure is the basic underlying framework of facilities and systems.

So, it might be helpful to think about IT, or information technology, infrastructure in terms of a city's infrastructure.

In a city, the infrastructure includes transportation, communications, power, water, fuel, and other essential services.

Comparing it to IT infrastructure, the people in the city are like "users," and the cars, bikes, and buildings are like "applications."

Everything that goes into creating and supporting those services is the infrastructure.

Compute resources can be - VM, Storage, Networking, APIs / Services

Cloud Service Offerings

IaaS – Infrastructure as a Service

IaaS offerings provide raw compute, storage, and network capabilities, organized virtually into resources that are like physical data centers.

PaaS – Platform as a Service

PaaS offerings bind code to libraries that provide access to the infrastructure applications need.

This allows more resources to be focused on application logic.

IaaS v/s PaaS

As cloud computing has evolved, the momentum has shifted toward managed infrastructure and managed services.

Leveraging managed resources and services allows companies to concentrate more on their business goals and spend less time and money on creating and maintaining their technical infrastructure.

It allows companies to deliver products and services to their customers more quickly and reliably.

Serverless is yet another step in the evolution of cloud computing.

Serverless computing allows developers to concentrate on their code, rather than on server configuration, by eliminating the need for any infrastructure management.

Serverless technologies offered by Google include Cloud Functions, which manages event-driven code as a pay-as-you-go service, and Cloud Run, which allows customers to deploy their containerized microservices–based application in a fully managed environment.

SaaS – Software as a Service

You might also have heard about software as a service (SaaS) and wondered what it is and how it fits into the cloud ecosphere.

SaaS applications are not installed on your local computer; they run in the cloud as a service and are consumed directly over the internet by end users.

Google's popular applications like Gmail, Docs, and Drive, collectively known as Google Workspace, are all classified as SaaS.

Google Cloud Infrastructure

We can think of the Google Cloud infrastructure in three layers.

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At the base layer is networking and security, which lays the foundation to support all of Google’s infrastructure and applications.

On the next layer sit compute and storage.

Google Cloud separates, or decouples, as it’s technically called, compute and storage so they can scale independently based on need.

And on the top layer sit the big data and machine learning products, which enable you to perform tasks to ingest, store, process, and deliver business insights, data pipelines, and machine learning models.

You can accomplish these tasks without needing to manage and scale the underlying infrastructure. Organizations with growing data needs often require lots of compute power to run big data jobs. And as organizations design for the future, the need for compute power only grows.

Google Cloud Computing Services

Google Cloud Storage Services

Big Data and ML Products

Vertex AI, the unified ML platform as previously mentioned, the Google network is part of the foundation that supports all of Google’s infrastructure and applications.

Google Network

Google network is designed to give customers the highest possible throughput and lowest possible latencies for their applications by leveraging more than 100 content caching nodes worldwide–locations where high demand content is cached for quicker access–to respond to user requests from the location that will provide the quickest response time.

Google Cloud’s infrastructure is based in five major geographic locations: North America, South America, Europe, Asia, and Australia.

Having multiple service locations is important because choosing where to locate applications affects qualities like availability, durability, and latency, which measures the time a packet of information takes to travel from its source to its destination.

Regions and Zones

Each of these locations is divided into several different regions and zones.

Regions represent independent geographic areas and are composed of zones.

For example, London, or europe-west2, is a region that currently contains three different zones.

A zone is an area where Google Cloud resources are deployed.

For example, let’s say you launch a virtual machine using Compute Engine–more about Compute Engine in a bit–it will run in the zone that you specify to ensure resource redundancy.

Zonal resources operate within a single zone, which means that if a zone becomes unavailable, the resources won’t be available either.

Google Cloud lets users specify the geographical locations to run services and resources.

In many cases, you can even specify the location on a zonal, regional, or multi-regional level.

This is useful for bringing applications closer to users around the world, and for protection in case there are issues with an entire region, say, due to a natural disaster.

A few of Google Cloud’s services support placing resources in what we call a multi-region.

For example, Cloud Spanner multi-region configurations allow you to replicate the database's data not just in multiple zones, but in multiple zones across multiple regions, as defined by the instance configuration.

These additional replicas enable you to read data with low latency from multiple locations close to or within the regions in the configuration, like The Netherlands and Belgium.

Google Cloud currently supports 103 zones in 34 regions, though this is increasing all the time.

The most up to date info can be found at https://cloud.google.com/about/locations