The super-efficient, scalable, secure Google Infrastructure Platform is available since last December for everyone to use in the form of Google Cloud Platform (GCP). Google is investing heavily on GCP to make a world-class infrastructure to deploy the applications for everybody in the world.
In the last 12 months, Google made great progress and added lots of features and announcements to its Cloud Platform. Here is the summary of the major features and announcements:
- Google Compute Engine preview in May 2013
- PHP for Google App Engine preview in May 2013
- Layer 3 Load Balancing in August 2013
- One million requests per second capability to Compute Engine Load Balancing in November 2013
- Cloud Endpoints and Dedicated Memcache general available in November 2013
- Compute Engine general available announcement in December 2013
- Cloud SQL general available in February 2014
- HIPAA Compliance Support to GCP in February 2014
Google Cloud Platform has conducted an event on March 25th, 2014 called Google Cloud Platform Live Event. Google has made some announcements and launched a bunch of features and enhancements to its Google Cloud Platform. Here is a summary of how the new features of GCP will change the Cloud Computing game.
Moore’s Law Pricing
Google Cloud Platform has reduced the On Demand Instances pricing to 32%, Storage pricing to 68%. In general, Hardware prices have been falling 20-30% annually, but Public Cloud prices have been falling only 6-8% annually. To change the pricing game, Google is following Moore’s Law to reduce the Cloud resources pricing directly proportional to the Hardware pricing.
Sustained-use discounts
Unlike other Cloud Providers, Google introduced a new way of discounting the customers for long-running cloud resources called “Sustained-use discounts”. With this new approach, there won’t be No Upfront Payments, No Lock-in period, No Complexity in Price Calculation. If a customer uses a VM in running mode more than 25% of the month, on top of that every additional minute it will become cheaper. With this, there will be a 53% price drop on Compute Engine instances with 24×7 usage per month.
New Operating Systems on GCE
Earlier, GCE supported CentOS and Debian Operating Systems only. Now, they announced the support of Commercial Linux versions like RedHat and SUSE Enterprise Linux. And they are also supporting Windows Server 2008 in preview mode. With this new Operating Systems support, GCE will attract more customers to deploy their workloads on the Google Cloud Platform.
Cloud DNS
Google Cloud DNS is a high performance, resilient, and global DNS service that provides programmable, authoritative DNS service which can be used to easily publish and manage DNS records. Google relies on the same infrastructure too. This provides low latency and high performances with the Google redundant infrastructure across the world.
Free Private Git Repository
Google is providing a free Private Git Repository for every project in Google App Engine. This will help customers to manage their code within the Google Cloud Platform. And it will allow developers to change or update the code on the console itself and then deploy immediately for quick fixes. This way customers don’t need to use any Public or Private Git repositories. This will also help customers to quickly roll out the changes from lower environments to production environments.
Enhanced Command-line and Developer console
GCP has a single unique command-line tool called “gcloud” for all their services. Google introduces every new feature in the command line first and later add it to their Developer Console. GCP is adding more of its features to the Developer Console to be more user-friendly at the browser level.
BigQuery
BigQuery is built on top of Google’s internal analytics tool and is used to analyze a lot of data and logs of Google Front End Web Services with a friendly SQL like syntax. BigQuery started out to allow 1000 rows per second. Now, it allows 100k rows per second to process and analyze the data. This helps organizations to analyze their BigData faster than earlier.
With all the above features and announcements, Google Cloud Platform will surely rock the Cloud world in the coming months.
