GCP Overview & Core Services

Why GCP?

Data & ML Focus:

• 11% market share (third largest)
• Strength in big data, analytics, ML
• Used by Google (obviously) and data-heavy companies
• Best-in-class machine learning tools
• Excellent for data science teams
• Strong Kubernetes ecosystem (Google created K8s)

GCP Global Infrastructure

Regions

40+ regions worldwide

Zones

Each region has 3+ zones (like availability zones)

# List zones
gcloud compute zones list
 
# Set default zone
gcloud config set compute/zone us-central1-a

GCP Terminology

Project: Container for all resources and billing Region: Geographic location Zone: Data center within region Service: Individual cloud service (Compute Engine, Cloud Storage, etc.)

# Create project
gcloud projects create my-project
 
# List projects
gcloud projects list
 
# Set current project
gcloud config set project my-project

Core GCP Services

Compute

Compute Engine - VMs (like EC2)

gcloud compute instances create my-instance --image=ubuntu-2004-lts --zone=us-central1-a

App Engine - PaaS (like Elastic Beanstalk)

gcloud app deploy

Cloud Functions - Serverless (like Lambda)

gcloud functions deploy myFunction --runtime python39 --trigger-http

GKE (Google Kubernetes Engine) - Managed Kubernetes

gcloud container clusters create my-cluster --zone us-central1-a

Storage

Cloud Storage - Object storage (like S3)

gcloud storage buckets create gs://my-bucket
gcloud storage cp myfile.txt gs://my-bucket/

Persistent Disk - Block storage (like EBS)

gcloud compute disks create my-disk --size=100GB --zone=us-central1-a

Firestore/Datastore - Cloud file storage

gcloud firestore databases create --location=us-central1

Database

Cloud SQL - Managed MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQL Server

gcloud sql instances create my-database --database-version=POSTGRES_13

BigQuery - Data warehouse (analyze terabytes in seconds)

gcloud bigquery datasets create my_dataset

Firestore - NoSQL, real-time database

gcloud firestore databases create --location=us-central1

Networking

VPC (Virtual Private Cloud) - Your private network

gcloud compute networks create my-network --subnet-mode=custom

Cloud Load Balancing - Global load balancing

gcloud compute backend-services create my-backend-service

Cloud CDN - Content delivery network

# Enable CDN on backend service
gcloud compute backend-services update my-service --enable-cdn

Big Data & ML

Dataflow - Batch and stream processing

gcloud dataflow jobs run my-job --gcs-location gs://my-bucket/template

Pub/Sub - Message queuing

gcloud pubsub topics create my-topic

Vertex AI - Machine learning platform

gcloud ai endpoints list

Unique GCP Strengths

🔄 BigQuery - Analyze massive datasets instantly 📊 Vertex AI - Complete ML platform (AutoML, custom training) 📫 Pub/Sub - Global messaging system 🚀 Dataflow - Apache Beam as managed service 📂 Cloud Storage - Highly consistent, global availability 🔎 Cloud Audit Logs - Comprehensive audit trail

Pricing

Pay-As-You-Go (like AWS/Azure) Committed Use Discounts - Contract pricing Free Tier - $300 credit for 90 days Per-second Billing (not hourly like AWS)

GCP vs AWS vs Azure