Category: GCP

Google Cloud Platform

Google Cloud Platform

Future-Proof Infrastructure

Secure, global, high-performance, cost-effective and constantly improving. We’ve built our cloud for the long haul.

Seriously Powerful Data & Analytics

Tap into big data to find answers faster and build better products.

Serverless, Just Code

Grow from prototype to production to planet-scale, without having to think about capacity, reliability or performance.

Advantages

  • Google Cloud allows you to depart from the predefined configurations as seen above and customize your instance’s CPU and RAM resources to fit your workload. These are known as custom machines. Other types include Google Cloud Preemptible VMs
  • GCP has higher performance for Storage
  • GCP is priced lower/competitively to AWS
    • Google Cloud Platform also launched their per second billing and Google seems to be slightly lower in pricing.
    • Comparison of Google Cloud Committed Use Discounts vs AWS Reserved Instances
    • Another really huge cost-saving discount that Google Cloud offers is what they call Sustained Use Discounts. These are automatic discounts that Google Cloud Platform provide the longer you use the instance, unlike with AWS where you have to reserve the instance for a long period of time.
  • GCP free tier with no time limits attached.
    • Google Cloud offers a $300 credit which lasts for 12 months. And as of March 2017, they also have a free tier with no time limits attached. Here is an example of an instance you could run forever for free with GCP.
      • f1-micro instance with 0.2 virtual CPU, 0.60 GB of memory, backed by a shared physical core. (US regions only)
      • 30 GB disk with 5 GB cloud storage
  • GCP Network Tiers – With Network Service Tiers, GCP is the first major public cloud to offer a tiered cloud network – https://cloud.google.com/network-tiers/
    • Premium Tier delivers GCP traffic over Google’s well-provisioned, low latency, highly reliable global network. This network consists of an extensive global private fiber network with over 100 points of presence (POPs) across the globe. By this measure, Google’s network is the largest of any public cloud provider. See the Google Cloud network map. GCP customers benefit from the global features within Global Load Balancing, another Premium Tier feature. You not only get the management simplicity of a single anycast IPv4 or IPv6 Virtual IP (VIP), but can also expand seamlessly across regions, and overflow or fail over to other regions.
    • Google Cloud Platform launched their separate premium tier and standard tier networks. This makes them the first major public cloud to offer a tiered cloud network. The premium tier delivers traffic over Google’s well-provisioned, low latency, highly reliable global network. Redundancy is key, and that’s why there are at least three independent paths (N+2 redundancy) between any two locations on the Google network, helping ensure that traffic continues to flow between the locations even in the event of a disruption.
  • GCP has lower latency than AWS, due to Google having its own backhaul fibre optics network, over Google’s backbone, not over the Internet.
    •  FASTER Cable System which gives Google access to up to 10Tbps (Terabits per second) of the cable’s total 60Tbps bandwidth between the US and Japan. They are using this for Google Cloud and Google App customers. The 9,000km trans-Pacific cable is the highest-capacity undersea cable ever built and lands in Oregon in the United States and two landing points in Japan. Google is also one of six members which have sole access to a pair of 100Gb/s x 100 wavelengths optical transmission strands between Oregon and Japan.
  • Google Cloud also has a unique feature with their ability to live migrate virtual machines. Benefits of live migrations allow for the engineers at Google to better address issues such as patching, repairing, and updating the software and hardware, without the need for you to worry about machine reboots
    • AWS provides Availability Zones and has concepts that your design needs to adhere to such as Availability and Durability.
    • Availability: refers to the ability of a system or component to be operational and accessible if required (system uptime). The availability of a system or component can be increased by adding redundancy to it. In case of a failure, the redundant parts prevent the failure of the entire system (e.g. database cluster with several nodes).
    • Durability: refers to the ability of a system to assure data is stored and data remains consistently on the system as long as it is not changed by legitimate access. Means that data should not get corrupted or disappears because of a system malfunction.
  •  Reference
  • GCP Security have been built over 15 years to protects its own service such as gmail and GCP has implement security as the core via GCP identify services and other features.
  • Google Firebase integration – Google provides Application Development Languages such as Angular, Go, DART and Fluter that enables developers to create high performance multi platform and native applications very quickly and integration with Google Firebase means that a develop can access the full capability of GCP via the IDE such as Visual Studio Code. The nirvana is the ability to develop a front end and back end app via the IDE, then connect and manage full capability of the GCP cloud via Firebase and the IDE/your application architecture.
  • GCP and Infrastructure as a Code has really good intergration with Hasiicorp tools and Anisible – https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/gcp/hashicorp-and-google-expand-collaboration-easing-secret-and-infrastructure-management
  • Google Kubernetes has advantages over AWS Container services for security and orchestration  and management
  • Integration with Network Edge and SD-WAN, VMware VeloCloud and Google Andromeda.

Google Cloud Migration Methodology / Digital Transformation and Modernisation

  1. Assess the current environment to gain a solid understanding of existing resources and define migration move groups.
  2. Plan how to move your apps and create the basic cloud infrastructure for your workloads to live. This planning includes identity management, organization and project structure, networking, sorting your apps and developing a prioritized migration strategy.
  3. Deploy the existing on-premise or cloud-based servers in GCP leveraging one of Google Cloud’s recommended migration tools like Google’s Velostrata or CloudEndure’s Live Migration Tool
  4. Optimize your newly migrated workloads to realize the true cost benefits and operational efficiencies that GCP can bring to the enterprise

Assess

  • Rehosting
  • Replatforming
  • Repurchasing
  • Refactoring
  • Retire
  • Retain
  • Lift and Shift

Google Migration Tools

  1. GCP Assessment Tool – https://inthecloud.withgoogle.com/tco-assessment-19/form.html
  2. gsutil
    1. Command-line tools for developers to transfer data over the network. (free)
  3. Transfer Appliance
    1. Rackable storage server for shipping large volumes of data to Google Cloud.
  4. Cloud Storage Transfer Service
    1. Transfer data between cloud storage services such as AWS S3 and Google Cloud Storage.
  5. BigQuery Data Transfer Service
    1. Fully managed data import service for BigQuery.
  6. Migrate for Compute Engine
    1. Enterprise-grade VM migration to Google Cloud. (free)
  7. AWS Database Migration Tool can be used to Transform from RDS Database on AWS to GCP – https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/apn/introducing-the-amazon-rds-migration-tool/
  8. Goole Alooma – https://www.alooma.com/blog/alooma-plans-to-join-google-cloud

High Performance Network

  • Multi cloud requires configuration of high performance low latency networking using SD-WAN and Public Cloud Interconnects. – https://www.velocloud.com/sd-wan

GCP Storage migration partners

Console

[sourcecode]

gcloud auth list

gcloud config list project

gcloud config set compute/zone us-central1-a

gcloud config set compute/region us-central1

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Tools