Google Cloud

Google Cloud Platform

Updated October 3, 20262 min read

In short

Google Cloud is Google's public cloud platform, offering compute, storage, data and AI services on the global infrastructure behind Google's own products.

What is Google Cloud?

Google's cloud began in 2008 with App Engine, a platform for running web apps without managing servers, and grew into Google Cloud Platform, usually called GCP. It is one of the three largest clouds alongside AWS and Azure, and is known for data analytics, machine learning, Kubernetes and its fast private global network.

Core services include Compute Engine for virtual machines, Cloud Run for running containers that scale to zero, Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) for managed Kubernetes, which itself started at Google, Cloud Storage for objects, Cloud SQL and Spanner for relational databases, and Firestore for documents. Pub/Sub handles messaging between services.

Data and AI are its signature areas. BigQuery is a serverless data warehouse that queries terabytes with SQL in seconds, and Vertex AI provides tools to train and serve models, including access to Google's Gemini models. Projects group resources and billing, and the gcloud command line and Terraform manage them.

A common misconception is that Google Cloud is the same as Google Workspace or Firebase. Workspace is Gmail, Docs and Drive for organizations; Firebase is an app development platform that runs on Google Cloud and shares its projects. Google Cloud is the underlying infrastructure and service catalog for any kind of system.

Key takeaways

Google Cloud is Google's public cloud platform, often called GCP.
It started with App Engine in 2008.
Compute Engine, Cloud Run and GKE run code; Cloud Storage and Cloud SQL store data.
BigQuery and Vertex AI make it strong in analytics and machine learning.
Firebase runs on Google Cloud; Workspace is a separate product.

Example

Deploying a container to Cloud Run with gcloudbash

# Pick the project to work in
gcloud config set project my-shop-123

# Build the container from source and deploy it; it scales to zero when idle
gcloud run deploy shop-api \
  --source . \
  --region europe-west1 \
  --allow-unauthenticated

# Query a public dataset with BigQuery
bq query --use_legacy_sql=false \
  'SELECT name, SUM(number) AS total FROM `bigquery-public-data.usa_names.usa_1910_2013` GROUP BY name ORDER BY total DESC LIMIT 5'

Readers ask

What is the difference between Google Cloud and AWS?

They offer similar core services. AWS has the largest market share and catalog; Google Cloud stands out for BigQuery, its data and AI tools, Kubernetes and network performance. Pricing details, such as per-second billing and sustained-use discounts, also differ.

What is Cloud Run?

A Google Cloud service that runs containers on demand. You deploy a container image, it gets an HTTPS address, scales automatically with traffic and down to zero when unused, and you pay only while it handles requests.

What is a Google Cloud project?

The basic unit that groups resources, permissions, APIs and billing. Every resource, from a virtual machine to a bucket, belongs to exactly one project.