What is Cloud Computing?

Cloud Computing is the on-demand accessibility of computing power, storage, applications, and other IT resources through a cloud services platform via the internet with pay-as-you-go pricing. It uses remote servers or large clouds to store, manage and process data rather than a local server or personal computer.

Cloud-computing service providers offer solutions according to different models. The three standard models per NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology) are:

• Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)
• Platform as a Service (PaaS)
• Software as a Service (SaaS)

Popular Cloud Service Provider

In past ten years, companies have successfully launched and offered cloud services in different shapes, sizes, and types. Technology giants like Amazon (AWS cloud), Microsoft (Azure cloud), and Google (Google Cloud) have gained a major share in cloud services.
These providers offer several service plans suitable for both individual consumers and businesses.

What is Google Cloud Platform (GCP)?

Google Cloud Platform (GCP) is turning into one of the most important and growing platforms in the cloud market. It provides developers with several products to build a range of programs, from simple websites to complex worldwide distributed applications. These outstanding reliability results in GCP are already benefiting eminent organizations such as Airbus, Coca-Cola, HTC, Spotify, etc.

Google Cloud Platform is a set of cloud computing services such as Storage, Hosting, Computing, Networking, Machine Learning, and Management Services. These services provided by Google run on the same Cloud infrastructure that Google uses internally for its end-user products, such as Gmail, Google Search, Google Photos, and YouTube.

GCP solution for Data Engineering

GCP offers a wide range of solutions in the data engineering pipeline. The figure below shows the steps involved.

Ingestion

Ingestion means gathering data from multiple sources. This data could be of any type – structured, semi-structured, or unstructured data.

Batch processing and streaming are two ways data can be ingested in GCP. If you have batch data, you can use google cloud storage and different data transfer services available in the GCP environment, such as storage transfer services, BigQuery data transfer service, and transfer appliances.

For streaming data, PubSub is an available choice in Google Cloud Environment.

Storage

For storing a large amount of data GCP offers various cost-effective solutions that are secured, durable, scalable, offer high availability, and optimized. For different types of data formats, it has various storage solutions.

Process and Analyze

GCP offers tools through which we can process and analyze our data by writing complex queries to write simple one-line functions to process and analyze the data. Questions that can be answered in this step include:

• What kind of outcome one may want?
• What type of analysis one may want to perform?
• Converting data into meaning, etc.

Explore and Visualize

To visualize the results obtained from the process and analyze the steps in the data engineering pipeline, GCP offers solutions through which we can create dashboards, charts, reports, etc.

Google Cloud Platform Tools

The table shows tools that are available in GCP for four phases of the data engineering pipeline.

Figure 2 Tools available in GCP

Summary of Service areas:

Conclusion

In a data-driven world, the Google Cloud Platform can offer a wide range of solutions that can help organizations in attaining their business needs and fulfilling their objectives. The various solutions offered by GCP are secured, durable, scalable, high availability, and optimized.