Google Cloud Platform services offer networking, computing, storage, big data, machine learning and IoT, which run on infrastructure as a service. Customers are easily able to access computing services around the world, and they pay only for the resource they use. If a data center is not available, the system immediately falls back into the secondary center without any service interruption.
Google Infrastructure
Google Cloud Platform divides the resource into three categories, global resources, regional resources and zonal resources. A regional resource is under a global resource. Within a regional there is a zonal resource.
A reason to divide resources into many categories is to provide a solution that is error-free and not prone to any failures. We can quickly bring back our environment in case of any massive failures.
- Global resource - A global resource can be accessible by resource in any region or zone. For example, network is a global resource, and its subnets are a regional resource.
- Regional resource - A regional resource can be accessed by any region within the same zone. For example, sub network is a regional resource, and it is a subset of the global network. Within a region, there would be one or multiple zones.
- Zonal resource - A zone is a deployment area for Google Cloud Platform resources. A zonal resource is equivalent to a data center. For example, while creating a VM instance, we must provide the zone where the instance should be located.
Features:
- Cost effective
- Highly scalable
- Custom machine types
- Serverless
Advantages:
- Better pricing than its competitors
- Google invests in security to protect customer’s data
Explaining the steps on creating a Google VPC network, Google Compute Engine and Google Cloud Storage. A resource could be created in a GCP console https://console.cloud.google.com/
Google Virtual Private Cloud
Virtual Private Cloud Network provides networking functionality to ‘compute engine’ instances. VM present in one region can directly communicate with the VM in the other region without the help of VPN gateway.
Creating a VPC Network:
- Specify the name of your VPC network.
- Choose subnet mode as custom and click add subnet. We can also create more than one subnet per region.
- Specify the name for your subnet, choose the region, and provide the address range for the subnet.
- Click on Done to create a VPC network.
Firewall rules
As the name suggests, "firewall rules" are rules that decide which packets can travel to which destination. These rules let us allow or deny connections to our virtual machine (VM) instances based on a configuration that we specify.
Creating a Firewall rule
- Select your VPC network and click ‘add firewall rule’ under the ‘firewall rules’ section.
- Specify a name for your firewall and choose a network to apply a firewall rule.
- Specify IP ranges, protocols and ports.
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To create ‘Firewall rules’, click ‘Create’.
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‘Firewall rule’ is created for the VPC network(gcp_vpc_networking1)
Google Compute Engine
Google Compute Engine is an Infrastructure as a Service; it allows us to use virtual machines in the cloud. Virtual machines can be launched from the standard or custom images; Google computes engine offers virtual machines running in Google's data centers connected worldwide by the network.
Creating virtual machine:
- Click on create instance.
- Specify a name for your VM and provide a label name. Choose Region and Zone from the drop-down and select a machine configuration.
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By default, all incoming traffic from the outside network is blocked. So, in firewall section, you can select either HTTP (tcp:80) or HTTPS (tcp:443) traffic for creating an instance.
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Expand the networking section, choose network and subnetwork, which determines what network traffic instance can access.
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To create and start VM, click ‘create’.
Google Cloud Storage
Google cloud storage is a file storage service that is used for storing and accessing data. Any amount of data can be retrieved at any time. An unstructured stored object in containers is known as a bucket.
Creating a bucket and storing an object:
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Click create bucket and specify a name for your bucket.
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Select storage classes and configure required information.
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To create a bucket, click ‘create’.
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You have an option to upload files, upload a folder and create a folder.
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Once the bucket is created, you can directly drop your files here from your PC.
There is an option to download and delete files or folders.
Benefits of GCP
Many enterprises are increasingly adopting the Google Cloud Platform because the services offered by google allow us to use virtual machines in the cloud, which are highly secured. An entire organization's data can be easily stored and accessed at a reasonable cost.
Reference:
https://medium.com/google-cloud/what-are-the-google-cloud-platform-gcp-services-285f1988957a
