What exactly is Google Cloud Platform?

How is it organized, and

what makes it unique? In this module,
we'll orient you to the basics. >> Hi, I'm Nigel Armstrong,
presenting on behalf of Google. In this module, we'll introduce
Google Cloud, with a particular focus on how the platform is an excellent
place to render your Windows workloads. Google has a huge expertise
in running software at scale. You'll be familiar with Google Search,
Maps, Gmail, and G Suite, YouTube, Photos. These and many more applications
are part of everyone's day-to-day life through the Google Chrome browser and
Android cell phone. And now Google has shared its high
quality infrastructure with the rest of us with Google Cloud Platform. You'll be
able to provision your virtual
machines in Google's datacenters, and connect them over Google's
private global fiber network. Google Cloud Platform is a great place for people who
rely on Microsoft Server
operating systems and applications. You'll see how you can provision Google
Compute Engine virtual machines with Microsoft's Windows Server and SQL Server,
and when web applications went for the .NET platform on
Internet Information Services. The concept of cloud computing
began with colocation. Instead of operating your own datacenter, you rented space
in
the colocation facility. This was the first wave of outsourcing. With colocation,
the transfer of ownership was minimal. You still owned the machines and
you maintained them. Traditionally, colocation is not
thought of as cloud computing, but to begin the process of transferring IT
infrastructure out of your organization. Today, cloud computing involves
virtualized datacenters, virtual machines and APIs. Virtualization provides
elasticity. You automate infrastructure procurement
instead of purchasing hardware. With virtualization,
you still maintain the infrastructure. It's still a user controlled,
user configured environment. This is the same as
an on-premises datacenter. But now the hardware is
in a different location. Virtualization does provide
a number of benefits. The development teams can be faster. And you can turn capital
expenses into operating expenses. The next wave of cloud computing is
a fully automated elastic cloud. This involves a move from user maintained
infrastructure to automated services. In a fully automated environment, developers
do not think
about individual machines. The service automatically provisions and configures the
infrastructure
used to run your applications. Google's uniquely positioned to propel
organizations into the next wave of cloud computing. Google's first product on
Cloud Platform,
App Engine, showed in 2008 that anyone
could develop and deploy, scalable, highly available web
applications without provisioning service. And many key GCP products today are low
or
no operations. In Google Cloud Platform,
all resources are organized by projects that provide a container for
all the products on the platform. You'll provision resources
within a project. And the project serves as
an important identifier for billing of management of users in groups. Resources
within a project are either
global, regional, or zonal. Regions are independent geographic
areas that consist of zones. Locations within regions tend to
have round-trip network latencies of under five milliseconds. A zone is a
deployment area for
Cloud Platform resources within a region. It might help to think of this zone as
being similar to a logical datacenter with independent power network. And so zones
should be considered
a single failure domain within a region. In order to deploy fault tolerant
applications with high availability, you should deploy your applications
across multiple zones in a region to help protect against unexpected failures. To
protect against the loss of an entire
region due to natural disaster, you should have a disaster recovery plan. And know
how to bring up your application
in the unlikely events that your primary region is lost. The Cloud Platform
services and
resources can also be zonal, regional or managed by Google across multiple regions.
Zonal resources operate
within a single zone. If a zone becomes unavailable, all of the zonal resources in
that zone
are unavailable until service is restored. An example of a zonal resource is
a Google Compute Engine instance that resides within a specific zone. Regional
resources are deployed
with redundancy within a region. This gives them higher availability
relative to zonal resources. An example of a regional resource
would be a regional bucket for storing data in Google Cloud Storage. A few Cloud
Platform services are managed
by Google to be redundant and distributed within undercrossed regions. For example,
buckets in the United States location for Google Cloud Storage keep data at
REST inside of the United States. But at REST state can be stored in or move to any
cloud storage region
within the United States. Google Cloud Platform includes a wide
variety of products, services, and APIs to enable you to build your applications,
and
these are organized into product families. The Compute family includes
an Infrastructure as a Service product, Compute Engine, a Platform as
a Service product, App Engine, and a hybrid product, Container Engine. Many Google
Cloud Platform storage
products operate at petabyte scale including Bigtable, and
NoSQL key-value datastore. Cloud Storage for storing blob data, and Cloud Spanner
are horizontally scalable
SQL database with ACID transactions. Google's Big Data products
include BigQuery, which enables high performance
analytics at petabyte scale, Dataflow to run pipelines for
batch and real time transformation. And Pub/Sub to support your application
messaging requirements, all with NoOps. Finally, Google's machine learning
expertise is available via Cloud ML Engine to train your own machine learning
models
and host the train models from line or batch prediction together with best
of breed APIs for analyzing images, text, audio and video. From the perspective of
managing Windows workloads, each of the Google Cloud Platform products
is available via REST API with client libraries. In addition, you'll be able to run
your applications
on Google's Compute family products. With Compute Engine
offering Windows Server, you'll have support for
any Windows application. For Container and App Engine, you'll be able to run
Microsoft's new
.NET Core environment on Google service. As you'll see in the demo
at the end of this module, it's straightforward to access
Google Cloud Platform using a web browser, and there are two primary techniques.
First, the Cloud Console is
an easy to use web application where you can select a product
using the Products and Services menu, then configure
a server using just a few clicks. Alternatively, there's a set of
tools available via CloudShell, a command prompt accessible
from your web browser. You can also install the Google Cloud SDK
locally to run scripts from your own machine as well. Of particular interest to all
of us
who are Windows systems operations professionals is a comprehensive
support for PowerShell for managing Google Cloud Platform, including
cmdlets to manage virtual machines and a file system provider for
Google Cloud Storage. We mentioned previously that
on Google Cloud Platform, you'll always create projects
to manage resources. For Google Cloud Platform
enterprise customers, there's an additional container, the
organization, which is created when you signed up with Google
as a G Suite customer. Each developer or
systems operations professional will have a login to access
Google Cloud Platform resources. There are number of distinct options for
customers with active direction, including having separate
G Suites accounts, synchronized user names from Active
Directory by Google Cloud Directory Sync, passwords with Google Cloud Password
Sync,
or single sign-on from Azure to G Suite. Once your users are all set up, then
they log in to access project resources. There's a flexible identity and
access management system that will enable you to configure
role membership for groups of users to enable them to have just the access
levels that they need to do their work.