Run your workloads at Google Scale Maintaining computing infrastructure has always been a challenge for small firms and large enterprises alike. Running workloads either on the privately-owned physical datacenter or on a colocation data center is an expensive affair for most companies. This made many organizations switch to cloud computing. Over the last decade, cloud computing has taken the software industry by a storm. With Software Giants like Amazon, Google & Microsoft investing heavily, cloud computing has made the software solutions simpler, faster, and comparatively cost-effective. Whether you want to migrate your existing infrastructure to the cloud or use it as an extension of your on-premise infrastructure & need it as a disaster recovery solution, then you’ll be glad to know that there are multiple cloud providers to choose from in the market today. While evaluating and choosing the right cloud provider to suite your business requirements is a daunting task, this article can help you understand some key features of Google Cloud and what truly makes it stand-out in the cloud business. Though it won’t be wrong to call Amazon as the current market leader in the business, Google has a stronghold in various aspects. Let’s take a look at what makes Google function with an upper hand in the business. COMPETITIVE PRICING Be it per-minute billing, preemptible VMs, or multiple discount stacks, Google offers very low pricing for its cloud products when compared to contemporary cloud providers in the market. Google claims that its prices are at least 60% less for many compute workloads compared to other cloud providers Let’s evaluate how: Pay Per Second Billing Sustained Use Discounts Committed Use Discounts Preemptible VMs Sizing Recommendations Needless to say, all these discounts are cumulative, and using one discount will not seize your opportunity to use another one. ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE & MACHINE LEARNING CAPABILITIES ML Engine & TensorFlow Machine Learning Engine by Google is the first of its kind managed service in Cloud business. After you have developed and deployed the ML models, Google takes care of all the background operations right from their provisioning to maintenance. Through MLE, Google helps many organizations to analyze and glean insights from data effectively, which can help your customers to use services like virtual assistants (Google Assistant), ChatBots, etc. Your job can be further simplified with Tensorflow, Google’s once owned and later open-sourced deep learning framework that empowers all Google products (from Google Photos to Google Cloud Speech). Cloud TPUs - (Google’s own Hardware Optimized for Machine Learning) Cloud TPUs are a set of hardware accelerators designed by Google that are optimized to speed up and scale ML workloads to work in conjunction with TensorFlow. Pre-Trained Machine Learning Models at your Perusal Cloud provides multiple Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), which are tested and used by Google over a decade. You can use these ML models and pay for what you use instead of re-inventing the wheel again. Google Cloud Translation API Google’s native API is designed to translate the text of one language to another Google Cloud Video Intelligence API Google’s Intelligence API allows you to extract the metadata of a video file, search videos using keywords, and provide sentiment analysis of the video content. Google Cloud Vision API Google Cloud Speech-to-Text API Google Cloud Natural Language API Google Cloud Text-to-Speech API DATA SECURITY Security would be the first concern to anyone who wants to shift their computing to the cloud. Being a pioneer in the industry, Google brings its own learnings on the table to protect its customer’s data by all available means. Google uses its own reliable data security model, that it has been using for over 15 years, to help secure its customer’s data. This definitely makes Google the most trusted partner for anything from data center physical security to application security. It is also noteworthy to mention here that Google is the only Cloud provider that allows you to perform all sorts of penetration testing on its Cloud infrastructure, even without giving prior notice. Security Certifications Certified by more than 30 Globally recognized security partners (including ISO, PCI DSS, GDPR, SOX, etc.), Google heavily emphasizes on security, privacy, and compliance of its customer’s data. Data Encryption Placing your data on someone else’s data center requires a huge deal of trust. This is a primary cause of concern for most of the customers to shift towards cloud computing. You’ll be glad to know that Google encrypts all the data in its cloud, both at rest and flight. Additionally, it also allows you to encrypt your data with your own keys with the help of Customer Supplied Encryption Keys (CSEK). These factors certainly make Google the most trusted partner for anyone. GOOGLE’S GLOBAL PRIVATE NETWORK When you shift your workloads to Google cloud, it runs your infrastructure on Google’s very own, low latency, and highly reliable global network (right from fibers to undersea cables), which Google has been using to provide all of its services to the users across the globe over the past two decades. Google also uses its own B4 - own, private backbone network, which is used to connect its multiple data centers together. Have you ever heard of an organization laying its own fiber network across the Globe? That's simply Google for you. So, you save your money while also decreasing your application latency. ENVIRONMENTALLY FRIENDLY A recent environmental study revealed that all the data centers in the world will consume 1/5th of the world’s electricity by 2025. While Google has one of the largest data center infrastructure, it is also one of the greenest in the world. In 2017, with innovative ways of managing the data centers, Google became one of the few companies in the world that is already CARBON-NEUTRAL. Hence, when you choose Google Cloud Platform to run your workloads, you can rest assured that you will have zero carbon footprint, which will reduce your infrastructure’s impact on the environment. In addition to all the listed features, there many other unique features that make GCP your ultimate cloud computing platform. Some other attributes of GCP include live migration of VMs and unified API access for archival storage, fastest disk IOPS in the market, multiple instances attachable persistent disks, cross-project networking, PaaS, managed Kubernetes and spark services to serverless services, global Load Balancers, etc. It can be aptly concluded that, when you migrate to Google Cloud, you leverage all of Google’s own capabilities, right from its state-of-the-art security to its own private global network. Thanks to Google’s competitive pricing strategies, you get all these services at the cheapest available price in the market. So, what do you think? Are you ready to let your infrastructure perform at Google Scale?