GCP Consulting

• Google Cloud Platform (GCP) offers a collection of hardware (physical and virtual) and software resources which are made available as cloud integration services.
• GCP services are available all around the world and its infrastructure continues to expand over 200+ countries and territories, 24 cloud regions and 73 zones. They are available with pay as you go model with no up-front cost and no termination fees.
• Enterprises like PayPal, Vodafone, Forbes, Bloomberg, Twitter and many others leverage GCP services.
• Our team of Google Developer Experts, GCP certified professionals, multi and hybrid cloud experts help Fortune 500, large and mid-size companies with GCP development, consulting, recruiting services and hands-on training services.

Cloud computing services have seen rapid adoption in the industry. Many companies have started migrating their applications and services into the cloud. The industry trend is shifting rapidly towards cloud services. Many enterprises are already embracing multi and hybrid cloud strategies. 20% of enterprises said their annual spend exceeded $12 million, and 74% reported that cloud spend exceeds $1.2 million per year (1). It’s expected that at least 50% of enterprise software will be powered by cloud by 2025 and 83% by 2030. So, if you are thinking of migrating your applications and services to the cloud, you should feel great about your decision.

There are three kinds of cloud services: Infrastructure-as-a-Service or IaaS, Platform-as-a-Service or PaaS and Software-as-a-Service or SaaS. Database-as-a-service, which is a PaaS service, continues to be the most adopted service in the industry. Due to the revolutionary containerization and orchestration technologies like Docker and Kubernetes, container-as-a-service has also seen great acceptance. Google open sourced Kubernetes and uses it internally to orchestrate more than 2 billion containers. That explains the extent of scalability requirements inside Google and GCP is one way to tap into that infrastructure of unlimited scale for your business.

There are two types of cloud providers: public and private. Many enterprises and mid-to-small size organizations continue to embrace services provided by the public cloud providers. The top three public cloud providers are AWS, Azure and GCP. Although GCP is currently the third most popular cloud, it’s unique offerings have led to it’s incredible growth.

Have you worked with multi-billion-dollar software development, consulting and recruiting companies? If yes, we provide more quality services at a much better price point. Our team of Google Developer Experts, GCP certified professionals, multi and hybrid cloud experts help Fortune 500, large and mid-size companies with GCP development, consulting, recruiting services and hands-on training services.

What is Google Cloud Platform (GCP)?

Google Cloud Platform offers a collection of hardware (physical and virtual) and software resources which are made available as cloud integration services. These services run on the same cloud platform which Google uses to run its products like Google Search, Gmail, YouTube and many others. They are available all around the world and continue to expand over 200+ countries and territories, 24 cloud regions and 73 zones. Enterprises like PayPal, Vodafone, Forbes, Bloomberg, Twitter and many others use GCP services.

According to research, investments in Google Cloud products are expected to generate US$5.73 in revenue for every $1 investment. This number is set to reach $7.78 by 2025 following more than fourfold market growth (2). GCP services can be used for application development, management and deployment, database management, big data analytics, artificial intelligence, machine learning and for many other purposes. These services can be used individually or combined together to achieve specific requirements.

At Cazton, our team has experience and great expertise using services provided by the GCP and other public and private cloud providers. We can quickly identify, predict, and satisfy our clients' current and future needs and design and develop robust and scalable cloud solutions. Our team is well versed with GCP and can provide you secure and robust deployment solutions that suit your requirements.

Why Google Cloud Platform?

Google Cloud Platform continues to be one of the top cloud service providers in the industry. Here are some of the reasons we think you should choose GCP as your next cloud service provider.

• Global infrastructure: Google’s data centers are spread all around the world with best in class multi-layered security and fast network that powers their products like Gmail, Google Search, YouTube and others. With a planet-scale infrastructure, Google continues to offer high performance, maximum uptime, high availability and fault tolerance. Applications can be scaled seamlessly based on your requirements across multiple regions and availability zones.
• Live migration of VMs: Application down-time due to infrastructure maintenance and upgrades, hardware or network failures can be daunting. This is where GCP's live migration of VMs can be extremely useful. This feature is one of its kind and currently unique to GCP. When a VM is scheduled for a live migration, Google notifies the user that a migration is about to happen. The compute engine service migrates running VM instances to another host in the same zone avoiding the need for customer’s VMs to be rebooted. All VM configuration which includes internal and external IP addresses, instance metadata, block storage data and volumes, OS and application state, network settings, network connections, etc remain untouched. This feature helps clients to have continuous uptime and enables Google to perform infrastructure maintenance tasks.
• Strong network support: Google offers the largest network connectivity in the world which also comes with a private distributive backbone connecting all its data centers. Back in 2016, Google announced their investment in the trans-pacific submarine fibre optics communications cable called FASTER which is spread across 11,629 kms and offers an overall speed of 60 Tb/s (Terabits per second). The FASTER cable system gives Google access to up to 10Tb/s. It is the highest-capacity undersea cable ever built which provides about ten million times faster speed than the average cable modem. At affordable prices, you can leverage the same strong network connectivity using GCP services.
• Security: With GCP, you can leverage best in class security for different use cases including infrastructure, network, data, application, endpoints, etc. that meets your policy, regulatory, and business objectives. Your data is protected by the same security technology that supports Google’s private global network and meets thorough industry-specific compliance standards. More information about security is given in the below section.
• Flexible pricing: Like other cloud service providers, Google too offers a pay as you go model which is truly beneficial for many organizations. You pay only for the resources you use while enjoying the benefits of no up-front cost and termination fees. Though the pay as you go model is a very common billing model applied by many cloud providers, there are many GCP services which when compared with other providers are available at cheaper rates.

Types of Services

GCP offers more than 150 services with new one's being added regularly. Let’s take a look at some of its top service offerings.

• Computing: These are one of the most popular services on this platform. GCP offers a wide variety of computing and hosting services that help organizations to choose the best that fits their requirements. Right from virtual machines to bare metals, from fully managed App engine (PaaS) to serverless environments and containers, you get the option to choose an independent service or combine multiple services to host your applications. These services also provide easy to scale options to multiple zones and regions.
• Databases: In today’s world where data is the new oil, it is important to store data in the most secure and efficient way. Modern applications have led to the development of different types of databases including SQL, NoSQL and Search. GCP provides different types of database-as-a-platform service that are secure, reliable and highly available. Some of the most popular GCP database services include Cloud SQL, Cloud Spanner, Cloud Bigtable, Cloud Firestore and Cloud Memorystore. If you do not wish to use the database services provided by GCP, you can always install and set up your own database technology on a compute engine, that way you can use the technology of your choice and only pay for the computing services.
• Storage: While GCP offers database-as-a-service for storing structured and semi-structured data, there are scenarios where your workloads may require storing unstructured data like files, documents, images and videos. This is where GCP’s storage services play a major role. It offers services like cloud storage, persistent disks and others to store different types of data. Firestore is one such service, which can be used to store data that is being generated from applications running in the compute engine, VM instances or Google kubernetes engine (GKE) clusters.
• Artificial Intelligence: As the field of artificial intelligence and machine learning is growing, Google is striving hard to provide the best services to its customers. GCP offers a variety of machine learning services which you can use to build your own sophisticated models or use the existing pre-trained models. Some of their famous AI services include text-to-speech recognition, speech-to-text-recognition, handwriting recognition, form recognition, Vision AI, Video AI and many others. GCP’s AI platform enables you to run your trained TensorFlow models on GCP and get predictions for new data.
• Big Data: Today, organizations generate huge amounts of data. It is very important to manage, process and query that data to capture valuable information which helps in making huge business decisions. With GCP, we get different services to build and manage data pipelines, perform batch and stream data processing and data analytics. It also offers a NoSQL wide-column database called Cloud Bigtable for storing big data with low latency.
• Containers: Due to the revolutionary containerization technologies like Docker and Kubernetes, the container-as-a-service has seen great acceptance in the industry. Many organizations want to containerize their applications due to the various benefits offered by these technologies. With GCP, you get a variety of options to containerize your applications and orchestrate your containers. Based on your business requirements you can run containers on a variety of options including the container cluster management service like Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) or spin up your own VMs using the compute engine service or run it on a fully managed VM-based PaaS like App Engine or serverless environment using Cloud Run.

Apart from the services mentioned above, there are many other services available for security, data migration, application development and management, API management and others.

Security

When it comes to cloud computing, security becomes one of the most important features for any organization. Since we rely on third party services we expect that our data always remains secured. With GCP, we can take advantage of a robust and best in class security which even Google uses to secure some of its internal applications. Google remains committed to enterprise security certifications with regular audits for ISO/IEC 27001, ISO/IEC 27017, ISO/IEC 27018, ISO/IEC 27701, PCI DSS, TISAX, U.S. Defense Information Systems Agency Provisional Authorization and many other compliances.

Google offers multi-layered security through its unique products and capabilities.

• Infrastructure Security: Google offers multi-layered security which is distributed from the physical hardware layer to operational layer. Let’s take a brief look at each of these layers.
  • Hardware infrastructure: Here the physical hardware infrastructure is secured by implementing different levels of security, which involves limited access to physical premises, designing custom server boards and networking equipment like hardware security chips which are used in thousands of server machines deployed in Google's data centers.
  • Service deployment: In this layer, Google introduces security by providing controlled access management to end user data, encryption of inter-service communication and inter-service access management and more.
  • User identification: This layer deals with authenticating users who try to access the application or GCP resources. The individual before accessing the resource is identified by their credentials and based on the roles and privileges assigned to them get access to the resources. This layer also introduces the sign in abuse protection and one common example to this would be the reCAPTCHA service which helps identify if the individual trying to access the resource is a person or a bot.
  • Storage level security: This layer introduces encryption at rest and other encryption policies (discussed below) and securing internet communication between services and external resources over the internet. Utmost care is taken to avoid any kind of data abuse.
  • Operational level security: This layer involves securely creating infrastructure software, protecting employee's machines and credentials as well as defending infrastructure threats from bad internal and external actors. Google data centers introduce the layered security model with custom-designed electronic access cards, alarms, vehicle access barriers, perimeter fencing, metal detectors, and biometrics. The data center floor features laser beam intrusion detection.
• Data Encryption: GCP offers data security in three states.
  • Encryption at rest: Google uses the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) algorithm to encrypt data at rest. It means that when data is stored it is encrypted by default. Google uses 256-bit AES at the storage level and each encryption key is also encrypted with a set of regularly changed master keys.
  • Encryption in transit: Google offers data protection at different levels when it is in transit. It starts by encrypting the data before transmission, continued by authenticating the endpoints and then decrypting and verifying the data on arrival. Thus data remains safe even when it is transmitted between multiple GCP services or between a client application and a GCP service.
  • Encryption in use: When data is being used by servers for computation, Google protects your data using various encryption algorithms.
• Cloud Identity and Access Management (Cloud IAM): The most demanding and basic principle in GCP security and security in general is the principle of least privilege. This principle deals with providing fine-grained access control and controlled visibility of applications and resources. With Cloud IAM, administrators can easily control and monitor the operations performed by an individual on any resource. It offers a unified view into security policy across your entire organization, with built-in auditing to ease compliance processes.

There's a lot more when it comes to security features provided by Google. And through GCP, organizations get the advantage of relying on a world-class security infrastructure while getting fine-grained control over their data and services hosted on the platform. At Cazton, our experts have been using the GCP services for many years now. Our experts can consult with cloud and security best practices and help you with a solution which is secure and scalable. Contact us to learn more about GCP security and what our experts can do for you.

Deployment

Being a technology agnostic company, our experts have immense experience in deploying applications on various public and private clouds, on-premises as well as in a multi and hybrid cloud environment. When it is about deployment, factors such as security and scalability should be given the highest priority. Lack of prior planning and experience is many times responsible for failed or delayed deployments. This is where Cazton team can help.

Our team of experts embrace all security and deployment best practices and have years of experience deploying applications with custom scalability requirements in different environments. We provide secure and robust deployment solutions to our clients. We can help you deploy your applications and services on GCP's different computing and hosting services including virtual machines, containers, application platforms like App Engine and serverless environments.

We will audit and assess your requirements, design a strong, cost-efficient cloud strategy and provide a customized computing and hosting solution that will help you get the most out of these services at affordable rates. We focus on providing the best value to the client and recommend the best tech stacks for you. Our team has also worked extensively with other public cloud providers like Azure, AWS, IBM cloud and private cloud services and technologies including Pivotal Cloud Foundry, Service Meshes in Istio's, OpenShift, Terraform and many others. Feel free to reach out to us for any deployment related issues or service requirements.

How can Cazton help you with GCP Development, Consulting and Training?

At Cazton, our team includes Google Developer Experts, GCP certified professionals as well as experts in other Google and notable open source technologies. Here are the services which we provide at affordable rates.

• GCP development, consulting and customized training.
• Develop robust and scalable applications that can run in a multi-cloud environment.
• Help you integrate GCP solutions for big data analytics.
• Help you integrate GCP solutions for artificial intelligence and machine learning.
• Consult with cloud and security best practices.
• Consult you with design and architectural best practices.
• Build CI/CD pipeline and automate your deployment process.
• Migrate your on-premises applications to GCP or multi/hybrid cloud environment.
• Provide industry leading data migration solutions.
• Disaster management and data recovery.
• Audit and assess your requirements to design a strong and cost-efficient cloud strategy.