Introduction to Google Cloud Platform

6 min readFeb 27, 2022

History of GCP

Amazon Web Services Launches in 2006 After 2 years, Google also launches its own Cloud Services around the globe. In 2017 Kubernetes Service become available to Google Container Engine users.

Lynn Langit said about Google Cloud

Google Cloud is such a developer-focused cloud. You code everything first, and then the tools come later, if even. Even though their cloud is really powerful and really scalable, that is just not the paradigm. Whereas AWS is a DevOps cloud and I think that being of the driver of their success.

Google Cloud also recruit Site Reliability Engineer. Site Reliability Engineers create software that improves the reliability of systems in production, fixing issues, responding to incidents, and usually taking on-call responsibilities. Google Provide Free access to Site Reliability Engineer’s E-Book and start learning today.

Google Cloud Core Principle for Google DataCenter

Google Cloud follows a two-way core principle for the data center which includes Performance, Availability, Security, and Scalability.

Google Cloud Physical Infrastructure

Google Cloud follows the Global Model. In Global Model, we have Regions, Zones, Multi-Regions, Private Global networks, and Network Edge Locations. Google Cloud resources are hosted in multiple locations worldwide. These locations are composed of regions with zones within those regions. Putting resources in different zones in a region provides isolation from many types of infrastructure, hardware, and software failures.

The location which is in the blue pinned locations in the region that has four zones in them.

Network

Google Cloud uses Content Delivery Network(CDN) from Edge locations close to the source. This can help google cloud to Global distribution with anycast IP.

Security

Google Cloud encrypted everything even if you did not encrypt your data, but Google always did. Google uses strong key and identity management, and on Google network is also encrypted.

Google Cloud Pricing

Google Cloud follows the Pay as you Go Method, which means you only pay for the services you use. Google also provides $300 Promotional credits to new customers and 20 free services on a monthly limit. You can check your usage using Google Cloud Calculator.

Organization

Google Cloud uses Project, which is similar to Google Account. In the Project, you can create resources, and resources can be shared with other projects. Projects can be controlled and managed in a hierarchy.

GCP Services

Google Cloud Services Includes Compute Services, Storage Services, External, and Internal Networking Services, Machine Learning/AI-related Services, Big Data Related services, Identity and Access Management Service, Security Management Service, Encryption Key Management Services, Operations Related Services and also includes Deployment API Services.

Right now, it's very hard or can be boring to cover all the GCP Services, let's focus on computing services for now.

Compute Services

Google Cloud Includes Zonal, Regional based services. Zonal Service includes Google Compute Engine, and Regional includes Google Kubernetes Service, App Engine, and Google Functions.

Google Compute Engine

Google Compute Engine (GCE) is an Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) offering that allows clients to run workloads on Google’s physical hardware.

Google Kubernetes Service

GKE is the industry’s first fully managed Kubernetes service that implements full Kubernetes API, 4-way autoscaling, release channels, and multi-cluster support.

Google App Engine

Google App Engine (GAE) is a platform-as-a-service product that provides web app developers and enterprises with access to Google’s scalable hosting and tier 1 internet service.

Google Functions

Google Cloud Function is a function as a Service or Serverless model where Developers can use it to create and implement programmatic functions within Google’s public cloud.

Hands-on: Exploring Google Compute Engine

First, you need to log in to your Google Cloud, and then you need to create a new project, so we can create the resources inside the project. Then from the left menu scroll down and from Compute Service select the Instance from where we can easily create the Google Compute Engine service. You can also search for this service from the top search bar.

You have three ways to create a virtual machine

Create using Google Cloud Console.
Create using the “gcloud” command-line tool.
Create using Compute Engine REST API

In this blog, we will create the virtual machine using Google Cloud Console, and secondly, we will do it using gcloud through which we can easily create the instance using Google Cloud Shell.

once you click you will see this

As you can see here, you can specify the name of the instance that you want to create. Specify the zone in which you want to create this instance. You can select the machine type that you want to use for your instance. There are numerous machines available from which you can select depending upon your requirement. You can even customize and create your machine type.

You can also choose the boot disk that you want to use to boot this virtual machine from.

From Firewall, Select the HTTP/HTTPS. Furthermore, you can select the service account which will be used by this instance. Don’t worry about the service account right now, just think of it as a way for Google Cloud Platform to identify and authorize your virtual machine in case it wants to communicate with other services of GCP. Now, to allow incoming and outgoing traffic, we have firewall rules and those are applied to Virtual Machines using tags. Review your changes and then click on create button.

Now let's install the Nginx server to this machine, for this, you need to click on the SSH. After connecting to the machine, use the following command to switch to the root user.

sudo su -

then update the Debian system using the following command

apt-get update

to install the Nginx use the following command

apt-get install nginx -y

once the installation is done, check if Nginx is running using

ps auwx | grep nginx

now switch back to the Compute Engine and copy your external IP and open it to your browser

Creating Machine Using Cloud Shell

Now we learn how to create a machine and how to install the Nginx machine on it, let's create a machine using Google Cloud Shell.

You can config your Google project ID using this command

gcloud config set project [PROJECT_ID]

after this use this command to create the machine

gcloud compute instances create instance-2 --zone us-central1-c

So it creates the machine using Cloud shell

Learning GCP

You can learn Google cloud for free for 1 month, thank you for reading till the end you deserve this, You can redeem your offer from here. if you have any questions suggestions or talk, you can reach me out :