Google Cloud Foundation Services

In Part 1 of the book, we dived into the Amazon cloud, explored and provisioned cloud services for compute, storage, networking, databases, big data, and machine learning. Now, in this second part, we are switching to another cloud platform: Google Cloud Platform (GCP). GCP has many similarities with AWS but also has many of its own features. Finding the similarities and examining the differences are what we will do in the second part of the book. In this chapter, we will focus on GCP’s foundation services, including the following:

• Google Cloud resource hierarchy – organization, folders, projects, and resources
• Google compute services – Google Compute Engine (GCE), Google App Engine (GAE), Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), and Google Cloud Functions (serverless)
• Google storage services – Persistent Disk (PD), Filestore, and Google Cloud Storage (GCS)
• Google Cloud networking services – Virtual Private...

Google Cloud resource hierarchy

Very similar to AWS’s global infrastructure, Google Cloud has global data centers where the physical facilities and data resides. Each data center has redundant power, networking, and connectivity, and there are Google backbone networks connecting them. These data centers compose the Google Cloud, which is divided into regions and zones, like AWS Regions and AZs. Figure 8.1 shows the Google global regions at the time of writing this book:

Figure 8.1 – Google global regions

In the cloud, there are Cloud Service Consumers (CSCs), each having their own resource hierarchy. The GCP resource hierarchy structure is quite different from AWS’s.

In the previous chapter, we discussed the AWS resource hierarchy, which consists of a root organization, Organization Units (OUs), and AWS accounts, from top to bottom. In GCP, the resource hierarchy consists of four main layers, as shown in Figure 8.2:

• Organization...

Google Cloud compute

We learned about EC2 instances in Chapter 1, which was about Amazon cloud compute services. Switching to Google Cloud, we will first discuss GCE VMs, which are like the EC2 instances in AWS, and then GKE, which was originally developed at Google and released as open source in 2014.

Google Compute Engine

GCE offers VMs running in Google’s cloud as a computing resource. Just like provisioning an AWS EC2 instance, we need to make choices about the computer hardware and software when provisioning a GCE VM in Google Cloud. Let us go to the Google Cloud console, provision a GCE instance, and add some cloud storage to it:

1. Log in to the Google Cloud console.
2. Go to the Google Cloud console: https://console.cloud.google.com. As we mentioned in an earlier section, each GCP resource belongs to a project, so you need to create a project first:

Figure 8.3 – Google Cloud console welcome page

Once a project is created...

Summary

In this chapter, we learned about GCP’s foundation services: compute, storage, and networking. We launched GCE VM instances, GKE clusters, and VPC networks. We also explored service accounts, containers, and their deployments in GKE clusters. We compared GCP’s foundations with AWS’s to understand their similarities and differences. We hope you enjoyed it!

In the next chapter, we will examine the GCP data analytics services, including databases and big data. It is a very interesting chapter. Let’s get ready to explore these services!

Practice questions

Questions 1-8 are based on the GCP foundation architecture shown in Figure 8.15. Default configurations are used:

Figure 8.15 – GCP foundation infrastructure

1. How many VMs (with at least one IP address for each VM) can you create in a VPC1 subnet1 in GCP?

A. 252

B. 255

C. 256

D. 24

2. How many IP addresses are there in subnet3?

A. 256

B. 252

C. 255

D. 24

3. Which of the following statements is not true?

A. VM1 can ping VM3

B. VM1 can ping VM4

C. VM2 can ping VM4

D. VM3 can ping VM4

4. What needs to be done for VM1 to process (read/write) objects in B1?

A. Nothing

B. VM1’s service account needs read/write access to B1

C. VM1 needs to have a public IP address

D. VM1 needs to have a private IP address and its service account needs read/write access to B1

5. VM1 needs to read object S1. What needs to be done?

A. Nothing

B. Enable Google private access for subnet11...

Further reading

• For further insights into what you’ve learned in this chapter, refer to the following links:
• https://cloud.google.com/compute
• https://cloud.google.com/load-balancing
• https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/instance-groups
• https://cloud.google.com/kubernetes-engine
• https://cloud.google.com/storage
• https://cloud.google.com/vpc
• https://cloud.google.com/vpc/docs/private-google-access