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We at DSP-Explorer have been working with relational and unstructured databases for the last 20 years, and with public cloud for the last 5 or so. We have the highest partner accreditations in both Oracle Cloud Infrastructure and Azure, and a growing knowledge of AWS.
For a while Google Cloud stayed off the radar, but over the last couple of years more and more of our customers were asking us to take a look at GCP, so we did. We were so surprised at what we found that we have made a strategic decision to make GCP a core string in our Multi Cloud bow.
This post is to share 5 things that you should know but probably aren't aware of – although over the next few years I expect GCP to be as widely known and spoken about as the other main Hyperscalers.
It may sound obvious, but I’d never really thought about it. In Q4 2020 Google’s parent company (Alphabet) made $56.9 billion (take a minute to let that number sink in). The majority of this revenue comes from advertising and search. The two most visited websites on the planet are Google and YouTube, which between them and equate to at least 12% of all internet traffic. All of this is run on the same infrastructure and network backbone that is GCP. So, questions around; “Yes but who is using it” and “is it resilient” and “but does it cover my region” all receive a resounding Yes!
I’ll say again - Google made a mind boggling $56.9 billion in the last 3 months of 2020, not from GCP (a paltry $3.8 billion) but from services that require GCP to operate at its highest capacity.
Google launched its app engine service (a web hosting and development platform) in April 2008, a full two years before Microsoft Azure (and two years after AWS). The service seems to have been more as an aside to the main business and was certainly not at the top of Google’s marketing agenda, but even so - 10 years is plenty of time to iron out the delivery wrinkles.
My career began in green screen data warehousing (Star Schema, Kimball Denormalisation and many other buzzwords of the day) and I have followed the trends with interest over the years. I was vaguely aware of Google Analytics but thought that it was very niche and only applicable to specific use cases. This had as much to do with my prior ignorance of Google’s capabilities as with Google's blasé marketing, which did not try particularly hard to educate anyone with only a passing interest.
It turns out that Big Query (online - inline data warehouse) is probably the leading word in petabyte scale, serverless, self scaling, multi-cloud data warehousing. The technology is amazing and the commercial proposition stands up as well (per second billing – fully managed), which begs the question of why isn’t it front of mind for any BI / reporting professional? Again, expect this to change.
The other main players talk a lot about Open Source. Microsoft speaks highly of Open Source compatibility and AWS is a stronger advocate, albeit with a healthy dose of proprietary applications and processes. Google is the gold standard in Open Source compatibility and portability; indeed, the entire GCP is based on a Kubernetes container orchestration layer. MySQL and PostgreSQL databases are as at home as Oracle or Microsoft (and yes there is a home for Oracle databases in or “near” GCP).
This also raises a point around the availability of skills. On the face of it technical teams will have more experience in AWS or Azure than in Google, but because of the alignment to Open Source it turns out that your engineers will feel right at home in GCP without even knowing it.
I fully expect GCP to catch up to and even overtake its competitors in the mainstream cloud consciousness over the next couple of years and urge you to take a look for yourselves. You never know - you may experience the kind of epiphany that led us to dedicate a practice to it.
For more on DSP-Explorer's capabilities within public cloud, head to our dedicated Google Cloud webpages or book a meeting with one of our expert team today.