Google Cloud Platform is #3 in Top 10 Public Cloud Platforms

Positions in ratings

#3 in Top 10 Public Cloud Platforms

#3 in Top 10 AI Platforms

Alternatives

The best alternatives to Google Cloud Platform are: Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Heroku

Latest news about Google Cloud Platform

2022. Google Cloud will shutter its IoT Core service next year



Google Cloud announced this week that it’s shutting down its IoT Core service, giving customers a year to move to a partner to manage their IoT devices. It believes that having partners manage the process for customers is a better way to go. “Since launching IoT Core, it has become clear that our customers’ needs could be better served by our network of partners that specialize in IoT applications and services. We have worked extensively to provide customers with migration options and solution alternatives, and are providing a year-long runway before IoT Core is discontinued” a Google spokesperson explained.

2022. Google expands Vertex, its managed AI service, with new features



Roughly a year ago, Google announced the launch of Vertex AI, a managed AI platform designed to help companies to accelerate the deployment of AI models. Today the company announced new features heading to Vertex, including a dedicated server for AI system training and “example-based” explanations. As Google has historically pitched it, the benefit of Vertex is that it brings together Google Cloud services for AI under a unified UI and API. Customers including Ford, Seagate, Wayfair, Cashapp, Cruise and Lowe’s use the service to build, train and deploy machine learning models in a single environment, Google claims — moving models from experimentation to production.


2019. Google Cloud gets a new family of cheaper general-purpose compute instances



Google Cloud announced the launch of its new E2 family of compute instances. These new instances, which are meant for general-purpose workloads, offer a significant cost benefit, with saving of around 31% compared to the current N1 general-purpose instances. The new system is also smarter about where it places VMs, with the added flexibility to move them to other hosts as necessary. To achieve all of this, Google built a custom CPU scheduler. Google says that “unlike comparable options from other cloud providers, E2 VMs can sustain high CPU load without artificial throttling or complicated pricing. It’ll be interesting to see some benchmarks that pit the E2 family against similar offerings from AWS and Azure.


2018. Google Cloud adds new applications performance monitoring tool



Google added a key ingredient for developers building applications on the Google Cloud Platform - a suite of application performance management tools called Stackdriver APM. It is designed for developers to track issues in the applications they have built instead of passing that responsibility onto operations. The thinking is that the developers who built the applications and are closest to the code are therefore best suited to understand the signals coming from it. StackDriver APM is made up of three main tools: Profiler, Trace and Debugger. Trace and Debugger have already been available, but by putting them together with Profiler, the three tools work together to identify, track and repair code issues.


2017. Google Cloud Platform cuts the price of GPUs by up to 36 percent



Google is cutting the price of using Nvidia’s Tesla GPUs through its Compute Engine by up to 36 percent. In U.S. regions, using the somewhat older K80 GPUs will now cost $0.45 per hour while using the newer and more powerful P100 machines will cost $1.46 per hour (all with per-second billing). Thus Google is aiming this feature at developers who want to run their own machine learning workloads on its cloud, though there also are a number of other applications — including physical simulations and molecular modeling — that greatly benefit from the hundreds of cores that are now available on these GPUs.


2017. Google Cloud Platform gets a cheaper, lower-performance networking tier



Google is giving its Cloud Platform users a new, cheaper networking option. Developers can now choose between a premium tier, which routes traffic to their users over Google’s own high-speed networks for as long as possible to minimize hops and distance, and a standard tier, which routes traffic over the public internet, with all the potential slowdowns and extra hops this entails. Pricing for the standard tier is 24-33 percent lower than for the premium tier in North America and Europe. Google uses different pricing models for these two tiers, though. Prices for premium traffic is based on the traffic’s source and destination, so you pay for the distance your traffic travels over Google’s network, while the standard tier’s prices are only based on where the source is.


2017. Google Cloud Platform improved its free tier



Google launched an improved always-free tier and trial program for its Cloud Platform. The free tier, which now offers enough power to run a small app in Google’s cloud, now allows for free usage of a small (f1-micro) instance in Compute Engine, Cloud Pub/Sub, Google Cloud Storage and Cloud Functions. In total, the free tier now includes 15 services. The addition of the Compute Engine instance and 5GB of free Cloud Storage usage is probably the most important update here because those are, after all, the services that are at the core of most cloud applications. You can find the exact limits here. With this move, Google is clearly stepping up its attacks against AWS, which offers a similar but more limited free tier program for its users.


2017. Google Cloud Platform takes on Windows Azure with new Windows VMs



Google announced several new products today aimed at luring IT pros who are using Windows in their data centers to the Google Cloud Platform. The company introduced support for Microsoft SQL Server Enterprise and Windows Server Core on the Cloud Platform. In addition, the company announced support for SQL Server Always-On Availability Group for customers who are concerned about high availability and disaster recovery when running critical operations in a cloud setting. What this means in practical terms is that IT pros can now launch pre-configured virtual machines running any of these products on Google Cloud Platform, and pay for them by the minute — or they can bring an existing SQL Server license they have already paid for.


2017. Google Cloud Platform gets a new key management service



Google Cloud Platform is launching a new key management service, that will help enterprises, especially in regulated industries like healthcare and banking, to create, use, rotate and destroy their encryption keys in the cloud. Enterprises have traditionally managed their keys on-premise, but as they have slowly moved more of their workloads to the cloud, they have also started thinking about how they can manage their keys in the cloud, too. With the AWS Key Management Service and Azure Key Vault, Amazon and Microsoft have long offered a similar tool, for example, and even Google itself already offered a more basic version of Cloud KMS for users who wanted to supply their own encryption keys.


2016. Google Cloud Platform gets new a cold storage service



Google launched Coldline - a new cold storage service for data archiving and disaster recovery (an alternative to Amazon Glacier). Google Cloud Storage already offered the similar service Nearline. But when Nearline came out of beta earlier this year, it also became much faster. Instead of three to five seconds of latency, access to data was now real-time. So, Coldline basically fills the gap that the improved Nearline service left after it came out of beta. Coldline storage will only cost $0.007 per gigabyte per month (and $0.05 per gigabyte retrieved). Nearline costs $0.01 per month. That may not look like a huge difference, but those numbers quickly add up if you are storing massive amounts of data.


2015. Google launched custom machine types for its Cloud Platform


Google Cloud Platform launched a new way of buying virtual machines in its cloud - Custom Machine Types. With new Custom Machine Types, Google lets you specify exactly how many vCPUs (up to 32) and how much memory you need (up to 6.5 GiB per vCPU — Google likes to be precise, so it doesn’t use ‘gigabyte’ and instead specifies the number of gibibytes). If your needs change — as they inevitably will — you can adjust the number of cores and memory as needed. Maybe you’ve outgrown the virtual machine with two vCPUs. Typically, you would have to step up to a machine type with four vCPUs, even if you only needed three. Because you don’t have a choice, you end up paying for more power than you need.


2015. Google Cloud Platform now allows to store Docker container images



Google announced the beta launch of the Google Container Registry for its Cloud Platform. This new service allows developers to host, share and manage their private Docker container repositories on the company’s cloud computing platform. By default, Docker offers its own public images registry so developers can quickly install anything from a basic unadorned Ubuntu machine to servers that have already been set up to run WordPress, mongoDB, Hadoop or virtually any other server package you can think of. Many businesses have no interest in publishing their containers to a public repository, of course. They can run their own private repositories or use services like Quay.io that offer this feature as a cloud-based service. At its core, that’s what Google’s Container Registry does, too, but with a focus on Google’s own cloud computing platform.


2014. Google Cloud Platform now supports server-side software for Windows



Google introduced Microsoft License Mobility for Google Cloud Platform that means Google’s customers can move their existing Microsoft server application software licenses (SQL Server, SharePoint, Exchange Server, and so on) from on-premises to Google Cloud Platform without any additional Microsoft software licensing fees. This makes the transition to Google’s cloud easier, and it also lets customers who prefer to purchase perpetual licenses to continue to do so. Besides Windows Server 2008 R2 Datacenter Edition is now available to


2014. Google Cloud Platform slashes prices, adds containers, VPN support



During its Cloud Platform conference Google announced new products for its Google Cloud Platform. The first - service called Google Container Engine that lets businesses move from managing application components running on individual virtual machines to portable Docker containers that are scheduled into a managed compute cluster for you. Another addition is App Engine with auto-scaling support, Cloud SDK integration and support for runtimes built on Docker containers. Other rollouts include carrier interconnect with partners like Verizon and VPN support, starting in early 2015. This will let users keep apps and data in-house and using the public cloud for other tasks.  Google also slashed the prices for its Cloud Platform that should make both large and small-scale business partners happy. In addition to a 10% drop in pricing last month, here's a look at the latest cuts: BigQuery Storage falls almost 25%; PD Snapshots is down about 80%. Meanwhile, Disk SSD storage is cut nearly in half; and the price of large Cloud SQL instances dropped 25%.