Hi I'm Eoin Carroll, a Technical Curriculum Developer in Google Cloud. What exactly is Google Cloud? How is it organized? And what makes it unique? In this module, we'll orient you in the basics, in this module, we'll introduce Google Cloud with a particular focus on how the platform is an excellent place to render your Windows workloads. Google has huge expertise in running software at scale. You'll be familiar with Google Search, Maps, Gmail, Google workspace, YouTube and Photos. These, and many more applications, are part of everyone's day to day life through Google Chrome Browser and Android cell phones. And now Google has shared its high-quality infrastructure with the rest of us with Google Cloud. You'll be able to provision your virtual machines in Google's data centers and connect them over Google's private global fiber network. Google Cloud is a great place for people who rely on Microsoft Server, operating systems and applications. You'll see how you can provision Google Compute Engine, virtual machines with Microsoft Windows Server and SQL Server, and run web applications meant for the .NET platform on Internet Information Services. The concept of cloud computing began with colocation. Instead of operating your own data center, you rented space in the colocation facility. This was the first wave of outsourcing. With colocation, the transfer of ownership was minimal. You still owned the machines and you maintained them. Traditionally, colocation was not thought of as cloud computing, but to begin the process of transferring IT infrastructure out of your organization. Today, cloud computing involves virtualized data centers, virtual machines and APIs. Virtualization provides elasticity. You automate infrastructure procurement instead of purchasing hardware. With virtualization, you still maintain the infrastructure, it's still a user-controlled user-configured environment. This is the same as an on- premises data center. But now the hardware is in a different location. Virtualization does provide a number of benefits. The development teams can move faster. And you can turn capital expenses into operating expenses. The next wave of cloud computing is a fully-automated elastic cloud. This involves a move from the user- maintained infrastructure to automated services. In a fully automated environment, developers do not need to think about individual machines. The service automatically provisions and configures the infrastructure used to run your applications. Google is uniquely positioned to propel organizations into the next wave of cloud computing. Google's first product In Google Cloud, App Engine, showed in 2008 that anybody could develop and deploy scalable, highly available web applications without provisioning web servers. And many key Google products today are low or no operations. In Google Cloud, all resources are organized by projects that provide a container for all of the products on the platform. You'll provision resources within a project. And the project serves as an important identifier for billing and management of users in groups. Resources within a project are either global, regional, or zonal. Regions are independent geographic areas that consist of zones. Locations within regions tend to have a round-trip network latency of under five milliseconds. A zone is a deployment area for Google Cloud resources within a region. It might help to think of this zone has being similar to a logical data center with an independent power network. So zones should be considered a single failure domain within a region. In order to deploy fault tolerant applications with high availability, you should deploy your applications across multiple zones in a region to help protect against unexpected failures. To protect against the loss of an entire region due to a natural disaster, you should have a disaster recovery plan. And know how to bring up your application in the unlikely event that your primary region is lost. Google Cloud services and resources can also be zonal, regional or managed by Google across multiple regions. Zonal resources operate in a single zone. If a zone becomes unavailable, all of the zonal resources in that zone are unavailable until service is restored. An example of a zonal resource is a Google Compute Engine instance that resides within a specific zone. Regional resources are deployed with redundancy within a region. This gives them a higher availability relative to zonal resources. An example of a regional resource would be a regional bucket for storing data in Google Cloud Storage. A few Google Cloud services are managed by Google to be redundant and distributed within and across regions. For example, buckets in the United States region for Google Cloud Storage, keep data at REST inside the United States. But at REST state can be stored in or moved to any Cloud Storage region within the United States. Google Cloud's products and services can be broadly categorized as compute storage, big data and machine learning. Leveraging compute can include virtual machines via Compute Engine, running Docker containers in a managed platform using Google Kubernetes Engine, deploying applications in a managed platform like App Engine, running event-based serverless code using Cloud Functions, or running stateless containers as a managed service like Cloud Run. Many Google cloud storage products operate at petabyte scale including Bigtable, a NoSQL key-value datastore, Cloud storage for storing blob data, and Cloud Spanner, a horizontally scalable SQL database with ACID transactions. Google's big data products include BigQuery, which enables high performance analytics at petabyte scale, Dataflow to run pipelines for batch and real time transformation, and Pub/Sub to support your application messaging requirements, all with NoOps. Finally, Google's machine learning expertise is available via AI Platform to train your own machine learning models and host the trained models from line or batch prediction, together with best of breed APIs for analyzing images, text, audio, and video. From the perspective of managing Windows workloads, each of the Google Cloud products is available via REST APIs with client libraries. In addition, you'll be able to run your applications on Google's compute family products. With Compute Engine offering Windows Server, you'll have support for any Windows application. For Google Kubernetes Engine, and App Engine. you'll be able to run Microsoft's new .NET Core environment on Google services. As you'll see on the demo at the end of this module, it's straightforward to access Google Cloud using a web browser, and there are two primary techniques. First, the Cloud Console is an easy to use web application where you can select a product using the Products and Services menu, and then configure a server using just a few clicks. Alternatively, there's a set of tools available via Cloud Shell, a command prompt accessible from your web browser. You also can install the Cloud SDK locally to run scripts from your own machine. Of particular interest to all of us who are Windows systems operations professionals, is comprehensive support for PowerShell for managing Google Cloud, including cmdlets to manage virtual machines and a file system provider for Google Cloud Storage. We mentioned previously that on Google Cloud, you always create projects to manage your resources. For Google Cloud enterprise customers, there's an additional container, the organization, which is created when you signed up with Google as a Google Workspace customer. Each developer or systems operations professional will have a login to access Google Cloud resources. There are a number of distinct options for customers with Active Directory, including having separate Google Workspace accounts, synchronized user names from Active Directory by Google Cloud Directory Sync, passwords with Google Cloud Password Sync, or single sign-on from Azure to Google Workspace. Once your users are all set up, then they log in to access the project resources. There is a flexible identity and access management system that will enable you to configure role membership for groups of users to enable them to just have the access levels that they need to do their work.
