The cloud is on everybody’s lips these days. What exactly does that mean? Turns out there’s a simple clear definition. Here it is, cloud computing is a way of using I.T. that has these five equally important traits. 

First, you get computing resources on-demand and self-service. All you have to do is use a simple interface and you get the processing power, storage, and network you need, with no need for human intervention. Second, you access these resources over the net from anywhere you want. Third, the provider of those resources has a big pool of them and allocates them to customers out of that pool. That allows the provider to get economies of scale by buying in bulk and pass the savings on to the customers. Customers don’t have to know or care about the exact physical location of those resources. 

Fourth, the resources are elastic. If you need more resources you can get more, rapidly. If you need less, you can scale back. And last, the customers pay only for what they use or reserve as they go. If they stop using resources, they stop paying. That’s it. That’s the definition of cloud.

Click here to check out more in-depth information about Cloud Computing and why is it important for us….

How did we get here?

But why is this model so compelling nowadays? To understand why, we need to look at some history. The first wave of the trend that brought us towards cloud computing was Colocation, which IT shops have been doing for decades. Instead of building costly capital intensive data centers, they can rent space in shared facilities. That frees up capital for more flexible uses than real estate. 

In the first decade of the 2000s, IT departments’ need for efficiency drove them to use virtualization. The components of a virtualized data center match the parts of a physical data center; servers, disks and so on. But now there are virtual devices separately manageable from the underlying hardware. 

Virtualization lets us all use resources more efficiently and just like colocation, it lets us be more flexible too. With virtualization you still buy, house and maintain the infrastructure. So, you’re still in the business of guessing how much hardware you’ll need and when, setting it up and keeping it running. 

About 10 years ago, Google realized that its business couldn’t move fast enough within the confines of the virtualization model. So, Google switched to a Container based Architecture, an automated elastic Third Wave cloud built from automated services.  In Google’s internal cloud, services automatically provision and configure the infrastructure that is used to run familiar Google applications. Google has spent billions of dollars building this platform and making it resilient and efficient. Today, Google Cloud platform makes it available to Google customers.

GCP Computing Architectures

Virtualized data centers brought you Infrastructure as a Service, IaaS, and Platform as a Service, PaaS offerings. IaaS offerings provide raw compute, storage, and network organized in ways that are familiar from data centers. PaaS offerings, on the other hand, bind application code you write to libraries that give access to the infrastructure your application needs. That way, you can just focus on your application logic. In the IaaS model, you pay for what you allocate. In the PaaS model, you pay for what you use. Both sure beat the old way where you bought everything in advance based on lots of risky forecasting.

As Cloud Computing has evolved, the momentum has shifted towards managed infrastructure and managed services. GCP offers many services in which you need not worry about any resource provisioning at all. We’ll discuss many of them in the upcoming blog-posts. They’re easy to build into your applications and you pay per use. 

By the way, now that I’ve mentioned PaaS and IaaS, you might be asking yourself what about SaaS? Of course, Google’s popular applications like, Search, Gmail, Docs and Drive are Software as a Service applications in that they’re consumed directly over the internet by end users. 

Click here to read more about all the kinds of Services, any Cloud Platform can provide you with.…

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In the upcoming blog-posts, we will take this a step further and get to know more about how the Google Cloud Platform provides us with these Services and it’s Regions and Zones….