As per various analyst reports, the third most significant public cloud provider is Google with their Google Cloud Platform (GCP). The origins of GCP can be tracked back to 2008 when Google launched the Google App engine to focus on the developer community with its foray into platform as a service (PaaS) types of offerings. Slowly and gradually, Google has expanded the set of services that it offers and it was really around 2012 that Google started to step up the focus around the pace of releases and geo expansion, which gradually made it one of the dominant players in this space. Since then, GCP has expanded into multiple different spaces ranging from core services like compute, storage, networking, and databases to many higher-level application services in the space of big data, IoT, artificial intelligence (AI), and API platforms and ecosystems.
In this chapter, we will focus on the following:
- Google Cloud Platform's cloud-native services, strengths, and differentiators around CI/CD, serverless, containers, and microservices concepts, covering the following services:
- Google Kubernetes Engine
- Google Cloud Functions
- Cloud AI
- Management and monitoring capabilities for GCP native application architectures
- Patterns for moving off monolithic application architectures to Google Cloud Platform native architectures
- APIs, SDKs, open source frameworks, and partner ecosystem support to build cloud-native applications
- Sample reference architectures and code snippets for CI/CD, serverless microservices application architectures