Journey to Google Cloud Platform (GCP)
Tags: gcp, devops, linux, codenewbie
Published: 2020-06-23 00:50:44

## 🔰 Overview
Most of us are heard about Amazon Web Services(AWS) and Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform (GCP), and other Cloud Providers. From experience, I found all the cloud providers are offering really competitive services.

AWS, Azure has a higher market share and popularity rather than GCP. But practically, It's always not necessary to choose one Cloud base on popularity. It depends on the needs. Sometimes, It could be wisher decisions so providers not act like monopolistic.  Cloud provider gives us the ability to make a hybrid cloud, I think that will be another cool option. Today let's make a visit about Google Cloud Platform (GCP)


### 🔰 About Google Cloud Platform

I found Google Cloud is very Developer focused. Google has site reliability engineers (SREs), not only Operations people to manage their services. Generally, I feel GCP built from Dev. sides rather than operations or infrastructure. Other hand AWS built from ops or infra sides rather Dev. GCP feels me Coding first then the tools come later, Other AWS feels DevOps cloud.

Google is all about Big Data. They have Smart Googlers they develop lots of internal innovation. They published many white-papers and released things as Open source like `Kubernetes (K8s)`. Also, they Commercialized their own used services like BigTable, Spanner, GCS, BigQuery, etc. AWS is a more regional basic service, on the other hand Google is intrinsically global.

I just try to put some constructive view, Other cloud providers give us the ability, but we need to implement those by own.



### 🔰 GCP offering me what? I have no idea about the Cloud!

I'm going to introduce something really helpful and handle to start. I would like to give a short reference so that anyone can start with GCP. Sometimes we need a high-level overview so that we can deep dive into it. It's not about expert or beginner, sometime overview and references help to memorize something in an organized way. You know we all are human so it's really hard to memories everything once. I would like to recommend don't try to memorize everything at a time. When you will have done hands-on later it automatically remembers. Here are those references,
 
![The Google Cloud Developer's Cheat Sheet](https://raw.githubusercontent.com/gregsramblings/google-cloud-4-words/master/DarkPoster-lowres.png)

- [Image Source](https://github.com/gregsramblings/google-cloud-4-words) | [If wants to look further, in details about GCP Products & Services.](https://cloud.google.com/products)

If some products and services are complex to understand then don't worry about that cause do not need to expertise on everything at a time. You have to pay for services as needed, you save money and can focus on innovation. 



### 🔰 How much it cost? I'm not going to invest money in that!

Yes, it's really important to thought. As a beginner or expert both have different perspectives on that topic. GCP offers,

![pricing](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/i/3wq7nvqxulmu6el85ulo.png)

Let me talk first about the beginner. They would like to explore GCP products so they deploy sample applications and play around on it. Once they get skilled, Students, startups, and individual developers deploy their first innovative application. And it's readiest for production with high availability, reliability, and scalability. So that they can serve their client globally. Other hands, Experts & professionals like to simulate their products and like to integrate third-party services. They might use other providers like AWS or Azure, so now they looking for something else that could GCP offers. Which gives them business value. For that reason, GCP offers `Google Cloud Free Tier`. I will talk about it later in details, [Additional, you can take a look at GCP pricing](https://cloud.google.com/pricing)


### 🔰 I would like to Explore the Google Cloud Platform!

For that reason, they offer **GCP Free Trial**. It does not get charged for the billing account. **We only need a credit card, for verification. Don't worry, later it must have to manually upgraded for a paying account**. I will be a great option who want to learn and explore GCP. **When you create a free trial account on GCP you also get $300 USD credit that you can use up to 12 months.** If you used up to $300 USD over. Then you're existing one will be paused and it offers you for a paid account upgrade. Additionally, It only allows for individuals and has some restrictions, remembers business accounts are not eligible for the free trial. [Open a Free Trial Account](https://cloud.google.com/free/).

![Alt Text](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/i/w2weqemt7imsfvn32fm6.png)


Keep learning and Exploring. Coding is fun 😎.

👌 Thanks for your time & passion. Feel free to ask me anything.


Say Hi to me on [Twitter](https://twitter.com/eng_sadhan) and [Linkedin](https://www.linkedin.com/in/csesadhan/) where I keep on sharing interesting updates.


### References
- [Training Courses](https://inthecloud.withgoogle.com/training-discount/register.html)
- [Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) Book](https://landing.google.com/sre/books/)
- [Inside Google data center](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XZmGGAbHqa0)
- [Google Data Center 360° Tour](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDAYZU4A3w0)
- [regions-zones](https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/regions-zones/)
- [Regions Map](https://cloud.google.com/about/locations/#regions-tab)
- [Google Data Centers Tools](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_data_centers#Software)
- [Security-Beyondcorp](https://cloud.google.com/beyondcorp/)
- [Network Pricing](https://cloud.google.com/compute/all-pricing#network)
- [Global Load Balancing](https://cloud.google.com/load-balancing/docs/https/)
- [How much it Cost - Pricing] (https://cloud.google.com/pricing)
- [Free Trial Account](https://cloud.google.com/free/docs/gcp-free-tier)