It has been suggested that Google APIs and Google Cloud be merged into this article. (Discuss) Proposed since December 2023. |
Owner | |
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CEO | Thomas Kurian |
Industry | Web service, cloud computing |
Revenue | US$33.1 billion (2023) [1] |
Operating income | US$1.72 billion (2023) [1] |
URL | cloud |
Launched | April 7, 2008 |
Current status | Active |
Written in | |
ASN | 396982 |
Google Cloud Platform (GCP), offered by Google, is a suite of cloud computing services that provides a series of modular cloud services including computing, data storage, data analytics, and machine learning, alongside a set of management tools. [2] It runs on the same infrastructure that Google uses internally for its end-user products, such as Google Search, Gmail, and Google Docs, according to Verma, et.al. [3] Registration requires a credit card or bank account details. [4]
Google Cloud Platform provides infrastructure as a service, platform as a service, and serverless computing environments.
In April 2008, Google announced App Engine, a platform for developing and hosting web applications in Google-managed data centers, 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 [5] of Google Cloud, which includes the Google Cloud Platform public cloud infrastructure, as well as Google Workspace (G Suite), enterprise versions of Android and ChromeOS, and application programming interfaces (APIs) for machine learning and enterprise mapping services.
Google lists over 100 products under the Google Cloud brand. Some of the key services are listed below.
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.
As of Q1 2024 [update] , Google Cloud Platform is available in 40 regions and 121 zones. This is a list of those regions and zones [41] [42] :
Region Name | Launch Date | Location | Zones |
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us-west1 | Q3, 2016 | The Dalles, Oregon, US |
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us-west2 | Q3, 2018 | Los Angeles, California, US |
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us-west3 | Q1, 2020 | Salt Lake City, Utah, US |
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us-west4 | Q2, 2020 | Las Vegas, Nevada, US |
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us-central1 [43] | 2009 | Council Bluffs, Iowa, US |
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us-east1 | Q4, 2015 | Moncks Corner, South Carolina, US |
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us-east4 | Q2, 2017 | Ashburn, Virginia, US |
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us-east5 | Q2, 2022 | Columbus, Ohio, USA |
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us-south1 | Q2, 2022 | Dallas, Texas, US |
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northamerica-northeast1 | Q1, 2018 | Montréal, Canada |
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northamerica-northeast2 | Q3, 2021 | Toronto, Canada |
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southamerica-east1 | Q3, 2017 | São Paulo, Brazil |
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southamerica-west1 | Q3, 2021 | Santiago, Chile |
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europe-west1 | St. Ghislain, Belgium |
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europe-west2 | Q2, 2017 | London, UK |
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europe-west3 | Q3, 2017 | Frankfurt, Germany |
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europe-west4 | Q1, 2018 | Eemshaven, Netherlands |
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europe-west6 | Q1, 2019 | Zurich, Switzerland |
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europe-west8 | Q2, 2022 | Milan, Italy |
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europe-west9 | Q2, 2022 | Paris, France |
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europe-west10 | Q3, 2023 | Berlin, Germany |
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europe-west12 | Q1, 2023 | Turin, Italy |
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europe-central2 | Q2, 2021 | Warsaw, Poland |
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europe-north1 | Q2, 2018 | Hamina, Finland |
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europe-southwest1 | Q2, 2022 | Madrid, Spain |
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me-west1 | Q4, 2022 | Tel Aviv, Israel |
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me-central1 | Q2, 2023 | Doha, Qatar |
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me-central2 [44] | Q4, 2023 | Dammam, Saudi Arabia |
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asia-south1 | Q4, 2017 | Mumbai, India |
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asia-south2 | Q2, 2021 | Delhi, India |
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asia-southeast1 | Q2, 2017 | Jurong West, Singapore |
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asia-southeast2 | Q2, 2020 | Jakarta, Indonesia |
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asia-east1 [45] | Q4, 2013 | Changhua County, Taiwan |
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asia-east2 | Q3, 2018 | Hong Kong |
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asia-northeast1 | Q4, 2016 | Tokyo, Japan |
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asia-northeast2 | Q2, 2019 | Osaka, Japan |
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asia-northeast3 | Q1, 2020 | Seoul, Korea |
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australia-southeast1 | Q3, 2017 | Sydney, Australia |
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australia-southeast2 | Q2, 2021 | Melbourne, Australia |
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africa-south1 [46] | Q1, 2024 | Johannesburg, South Africa |
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For those familiar with other notable cloud service providers, a comparison of similar services may be helpful in understanding Google Cloud Platform's offerings.
Google Cloud Platform | Amazon Web Services [47] | Microsoft Azure [48] | Oracle Cloud [49] |
---|---|---|---|
Google Compute Engine | Amazon EC2 | Azure Virtual Machines | Oracle Cloud Infra OCI |
Google App Engine | AWS Elastic Beanstalk | Azure App Services | Oracle Application Container |
Google Kubernetes Engine | Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service | Azure Kubernetes Service | Oracle Kubernetes Service |
Google Cloud Bigtable | Amazon DynamoDB | Azure Cosmos DB | Oracle NoSQL Database |
Google BigQuery | Amazon Redshift | Azure Synapse Analytics | Oracle Autonomous Data Warehouse |
Google Cloud Functions | AWS Lambda | Azure Functions | Oracle Cloud Fn |
Google Cloud Datastore | Amazon DynamoDB | Azure Cosmos DB | Oracle NoSQL Database |
Google Cloud Storage | Amazon S3 | Azure Blob Storage | Oracle Cloud Storage OCI |
Customers announced in 2023 include: Kingfisher, [93] The Government of Kuwait, [94] Deutsche Börse Group, [95] Unity, [96] Uber, [97] FanCode, [98] and Mercedes-Benz. [99]
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) is a part of Amazon.com's cloud-computing platform, Amazon Web Services (AWS), that allows users to rent virtual computers on which to run their own computer applications. EC2 encourages scalable deployment of applications by providing a web service through which a user can boot an Amazon Machine Image (AMI) to configure a virtual machine, which Amazon calls an "instance", containing any software desired. A user can create, launch, and terminate server-instances as needed, paying by the second for active servers – hence the term "elastic". EC2 provides users with control over the geographical location of instances that allows for latency optimization and high levels of redundancy. In November 2010, Amazon switched its own retail website platform to EC2 and AWS.
Google App Engine is a cloud computing platform as a service for developing and hosting web applications in Google-managed data centers. Applications are sandboxed and run across multiple servers. App Engine offers automatic scaling for web applications—as the number of requests increases for an application, App Engine automatically allocates more resources for the web application to handle the additional demand.
Microsoft Azure, often referred to as Azure, is a cloud computing platform run by Microsoft. It offers access, management, and the development of applications and services through global data centers. It also provides a range of capabilities, including software as a service (SaaS), platform as a service (PaaS), and infrastructure as a service (IaaS). Microsoft Azure supports many programming languages, tools, and frameworks, including Microsoft-specific and third-party software and systems.
Linode, LLC was an American cloud hosting provider that focused on providing Linux-based virtual machines, cloud infrastructure, and managed services.
AppScale is a software company offering cloud infrastructure software and services to enterprises, government agencies, contractors, and third-party service providers. The company commercially supports one software product, AppScale ATS, a managed hybrid cloud infrastructure software platform that emulates the core AWS APIs. In 2019, the company ended commercial support for its open-source serverless computing platform AppScale GTS, but AppScale GTS source code remains freely available to the open-source community.
Backend as a service (BaaS), sometimes also referred to as mobile backend as a service (MBaaS), is a service for providing web app and mobile app developers with a way to easily build a backend to their frontend applications. Features available include user management, push notifications, and integration with social networking services. These services are provided via the use of custom software development kits (SDKs) and application programming interfaces (APIs). BaaS is a relatively recent development in cloud computing, with most BaaS startups dating from 2011 or later. Some of the most popular service providers are AWS Amplify and Firebase.
DataStax, Inc. is a real-time data for AI company based in Santa Clara, California. Its product Astra DB is a cloud database-as-a-service based on Apache Cassandra. DataStax also offers DataStax Enterprise (DSE), an on-premises database built on Apache Cassandra, and Astra Streaming, a messaging and event streaming cloud service based on Apache Pulsar. As of June 2022, the company has roughly 800 customers distributed in over 50 countries.
Jelastic is a cloud platform software vendor that provides multi-cloud Platform as a Service-based on container technology for hosting service providers, ISVs, telecommunication companies, enterprises and developers. The platform is available as public cloud in over 70 data centers, as well as virtual and on-premises servers. Jelastic provides support of Java, PHP, Ruby, Node.js, Python, Go environments, custom Docker containers and Kubernetes clusters.
DigitalOcean Holdings, Inc. is an American multinational technology company and cloud service provider. The company is headquartered in New York City, New York, US, with 15 globally distributed data centers. DigitalOcean provides developers, startups, and SMBs with cloud infrastructure-as-a-service platforms.
Kubernetes is an open-source container orchestration system for automating software deployment, scaling, and management. Originally designed by Google, the project is now maintained by a worldwide community of contributors, and the trademark is held by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation.
Databricks, Inc. is a global data, analytics and artificial intelligence company founded by the original creators of Apache Spark.
Mirantis Inc. is a Campbell, California, based B2B open source cloud computing software and services company. Its primary container and cloud management products, part of the Mirantis Cloud Native Platform suite of products, are Mirantis Container Cloud and Mirantis Kubernetes Engine. The company focuses on the development and support of container and cloud infrastructure management platforms based on Kubernetes and OpenStack. The company was founded in 1999 by Alex Freedland and Boris Renski. It was one of the founding members of the OpenStack Foundation, a non-profit corporate entity established in September, 2012 to promote OpenStack software and its community. Mirantis has been an active member of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation since 2016.
Autoscaling, also spelled auto scaling or auto-scaling, and sometimes also called automatic scaling, is a method used in cloud computing that dynamically adjusts the amount of computational resources in a server farm - typically measured by the number of active servers - automatically based on the load on the farm. For example, the number of servers running behind a web application may be increased or decreased automatically based on the number of active users on the site. Since such metrics may change dramatically throughout the course of the day, and servers are a limited resource that cost money to run even while idle, there is often an incentive to run "just enough" servers to support the current load while still being able to support sudden and large spikes in activity. Autoscaling is helpful for such needs, as it can reduce the number of active servers when activity is low, and launch new servers when activity is high. Autoscaling is closely related to, and builds upon, the idea of load balancing.
Apache Flink is an open-source, unified stream-processing and batch-processing framework developed by the Apache Software Foundation. The core of Apache Flink is a distributed streaming data-flow engine written in Java and Scala. Flink executes arbitrary dataflow programs in a data-parallel and pipelined manner. Flink's pipelined runtime system enables the execution of bulk/batch and stream processing programs. Furthermore, Flink's runtime supports the execution of iterative algorithms natively.
This is a timeline of Amazon Web Services, which offers a suite of cloud computing services that make up an on-demand computing platform.
Serverless computing is a cloud computing execution model in which the cloud provider allocates machine resources on demand, taking care of the servers on behalf of their customers. "Serverless" is a misnomer in the sense that servers are still used by cloud service providers to execute code for developers. However, developers of serverless applications are not concerned with capacity planning, configuration, management, maintenance, fault tolerance, or scaling of containers, VMs, or physical servers. Serverless computing does not hold resources in volatile memory; computing is rather done in short bursts with the results persisted to storage. When an app is not in use, there are no computing resources allocated to the app. Pricing is based on the actual amount of resources consumed by an application. It can be a form of utility computing.
Oracle Cloud is a cloud computing service offered by Oracle Corporation providing servers, storage, network, applications and services through a global network of Oracle Corporation managed data centers. The company allows these services to be provisioned on demand over the Internet.
Google Cloud Dataflow is a fully managed service for executing Apache Beam pipelines within the Google Cloud Platform ecosystem.
IBM Cloud is a set of cloud computing services for business offered by the information technology company IBM.
The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) is a Linux Foundation project that was founded in 2015 to help advance container technology and align the tech industry around its evolution.