Hosting + Compute

There are two options if we want to host an application on Google Cloud Platform:

Storage

Google Cloud Platform provides several options to store and access users' data:

Google Cloud Storage: This is a highly available and scalable file storage service with versioning and caching. We will learn how to use Cloud Storage in Chapter 3, Storing and Processing User's Data.

Google Cloud SQL: This is a fully managed MySQL relational database; replication, security and availability are Google's responsibilities. Chapter 5, Storing Data in Google Cloud SQL, is entirely dedicated to this service.

Google Cloud Datastore: This is a managed schemaless database that stores nonrelational data objects called entities; it scales automatically, supports transactions, and can be queried with SQL-like syntax. We will start using it in Chapter 2, A More Complex Application, and learn how to get the most out of it in Chapter 4, Improving Application Performance.

BigQuery

BigQuery is a tool provided by Google Cloud Platform that allows to perform queries using an SQL-like syntax against a huge amount of data in a matter of seconds. Before it can be analyzed, data must be streamed into BigQuery through its API or uploaded to Google Cloud Storage.

Services

Instead of writing code from scratch, we can easily add functionalities to our applications using some of Google's services through APIs that are very well integrated within Google Cloud Platform:

All the tools and services provided by Google Cloud Platform are billed with a pay-per-use model so that applications can scale up or down as needed and we only pay for resources we actually use. A handy calculator is provided to have a precise idea of the costs depending on the services and resources we think we will need. Google Cloud Platform offers a certain amount of resources we can use without paying anything; usually, these free quotas are well suited to host web applications with low traffic at no cost.