THE TOP 5 GOOGLE CLOUD TOOLS FOR TECH COMPANIES

Cloud computing, which has become increasingly more important in the remote work landscape, is an essential component to increasing the scalability, agility, and cost efficiency of organizations in the tech industry.

Google developed the Google Cloud Platform (GCP) which provides essential computing resources for developing, deploying, and operating applications on the web.

If you want to offer applications that can reach users anywhere in the world, use sophisticated analytics and AI functions, use massive data storage, or take advantage of cost efficiencies, you HAVE to leverage the power of hyperscale data centers that cloud platforms like GCP can provide.

GCP is particularly useful since it has many tools and benefits that set it apart from other cloud platforms like AWS. These include lower pricing via a sustained-usage discount, a faster network connecting its data centers, live migration of virtual machines, massive scale and availability zones, and redundant backups for storage that is always available. Although GCP doesn’t offer the incredible number of tools and add-ons that other cloud providers offer, here are FIVE that are worth using and can meet MOST needs:

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TOOL #1: GOOGLE KUBERNETES ENGINE (GKE) AUTOPILOT

Google Cloud’s fully managed Kubernetes service, GKE, includes Autopilot: a mode of operation that is designed to decrease the operational cost of managing and optimizing clusters for production, and at the same time, improves workload capacity.

As GKE Autopilot manages clusters underlying infrastructure, including nodes and node pools, it provides a hands-off experience for operators who can then work on more important tasks.

Engineers don’t have to monitor the health of their nodes or calculate the amount of compute capacity required by their workloads, which results in time and cost efficiencies for organizations.

GKE Autopilot is incredibly useful since it supports most Kubernetes APIs and tools. Meaning, users can stay in GKE without having to interact with Compute Engine APIs, command line interfaces, or user interfaces.

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TOOL #2: BIGQUERY

BigQuery is Google’s serverless cloud data storage platform that can conveniently hold massive data sets in one location at low costs.

It has built-in integrations that make building and storing large sets of data simple, fast, and cost effective. It also centralizes data to allow auto-integrations with other GCP machine learning tools for advanced analytics. And, lastly, it has ETL solutions like DataFlow and DataProc that remove the overhead from data transformation.

Overall, BigQuery is an effective tool to manage the complexities that come with Big Data. It not only makes analytics simpler, it also makes it cheaper, faster, and more effective.

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TOOL #3: CLOUD BIGTABLE

BigTable is a database, in the form of an index with billions of documents, that can deliver real-time, very low latency access to terabytes or even petabytes of data.

As organizations grow larger and have more and more information to analyze, the need for quick, high read and write throughput of data becomes more and more important.

Unlike self-managed HBase installations that have design bottlenecks that limit certain levels of performance, Bigtable’s powerful back-end servers allow for incredible scalability, simple administration, and cluster resizing without any downtime. Which, essentially, means more effective use of time and resources.

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TOOL #4: CLOUD RUN

Cloud Run is a serverless container and deployment tool that allows developers to run pre-built applications by taking a Docker (OCI) container image and running it as a stateless, autoscaling HTTP service.

Unlike source-based solutions like AWS lambda and Azure, Coud Run is a fully managed platform that focuses on container-based deployment, allowing users to run applications serving many endpoints on a large scale with fewer restrictions.

Essentially, Cloud Run helps developers with one of their biggest obstacles in getting code deployed quickly by limiting restrictions and allowing apps to serve on a large scale.

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TOOL #5: GOOGLE CLOUD WEB APP AND API PROTECTION (WAAP)

WAAP is a security solution that delivers comprehensive fraud and threat protection for web applications and APIs, while at the same, maintaining complete availability and compliance with the applications it supports.

Since it uses the same technology that Google uses to protect its own public-facing services from exploits, attacks, fraud-bot activity, and other threats (like Google Cloud Armor, Apigee, and reCAPTCHA Enterprise), it’s a time and tested tool organizations can trust to keep their web applications safe in the cloud and on-premise environments.