By: Prasanth Madisetty – Senior Technology Leader, eLead – Data Analytics, CDK Global India
The Google Cloud Platform, offered by Google, is a suite of cloud computing services to manage customers’ computing, storage, data analytics, and machine learning needs. And the company strives to keep growing by adding new capabilities towards multi-cloud analytics, concentrating on self-service reporting, and offering cost-effective simple solutions.
Multi-Cloud Capability
In April 2019, Google announced that Anthos would help users manage applications and workloads on third-party cloud providers such as AWS and Azure.Users and customers want to be in the cloud without being locked and tied to one provider.Anthos Migration is a unique technology that helps containerize local virtual machines with minimal effort. Thus, further improving portability.
BigQuery Omni is a very similar solution to BigQuery, but the underlying dataset does not have to reside within Google Cloud.BigQuery Omni is a multi-cloud analytics solution that lets users securely access and analyze data on Google Cloud, Amazon Web Services, and Azure Cloud.Powered by Anthos, users can query data without having to manage underlying datasets.
In January 2022, Google Transfer Appliance enabled online and offline modes. The online method allows users to send data to cloud storage over the network. By using offline mode, users can still ship devices with data, which has been a traditional practice. Also, many improvements have been made to the Storage Transfer Services (STS) to allow users to copy data from the cloud or local on-prem system to Google cloud at a faster rate.
Simple and Cost-Effective
Batch is introduced in July 2022. It is a fully managed service that helps users to run batch jobs easily. With no additional software, Batch dynamically and efficiently manages the provisioning, scheduling, queuing, and execution of resources, giving users more time to focus on analyzing the results. It’s free and users only pay for the resources used.
Pub/Sub is a managed service that is highly scalable for messaging with both push and pull models. It is very reliable and guarantees delivery of messages with low latencies of up to 100 milliseconds. The only disadvantage is the high cost. Pub/Sub Lite was announced in May 2020. It’s an inexpensive solution and works by limiting data replication, to a desired area or region. Offers lower reliability compared to Pub/Sub.
Google announced Dataplex in May 2021, through which users get a centralized way to search, discover, manage, monitor, and govern data across multiple data lakes, data warehouses, and datamarts.It has unified search capabilities for a specific business scenario across multiple distributed data platforms.This enables central management of access policies and auditing across these silos. With Dataplex, users also get Data Catalog that automatically records and tags data entries in metadata store.This allows users to manage metadata and search for metadata as needed.
Self-Service Reporting
Google acquired Looker in June 2019. Looker’s integration with Google Cloud Platform enabled customers to easily create reports, analyze datasets, and gain insights from the data.In addition to the standard reports available in Looker, users can create and use custom reports in ReactJS or any other front-end framework.In addition, it is enabled with LookerAPI application programming interface for managing Looker instances and retrieving data from them. In recent years, a significant number of artificial intelligence and machine learning skills have been developed within our workforce. Millennials have invested heavily and adapted to changing trends. They have moved from traditional learning paths to newer online learning platforms and are more cloud-enabled than ever. In addition, more than two years of working from home have bought professionals time to improve their skills in cloud technologies. Many new organizations are trying to use this combination of skilled labor and SmartApp ideas to create solutions for the new age.