What’s Behind Google Cloud

IT innovations are a lot like horse racing. It’s an exciting performance: speed, power, and intrigue ― it’s all there. Fascinating as it is, it still attracts most fans because they hope they’ve placed their bet on the winner — the fastest, most powerful, and the first to cross the wire.

Technology is the same: like spectators at a race, we are excited to watch the power and speed of emerging innovations. However, when it comes to making the right decision, we all want to bet on the winner. In the world of cloud computing, one of the top contenders is the Google Cloud Platform.

Around the Cloud

Cloud services provide a flexible and affordable alternative to buying expensive servers. Regardless of whether a company is a corporation or a startup, it can easily create and scale up any necessary infrastructure with just a few clicks.

For example, cloud solutions help speed up the work of online stores, securely store large amounts of data, analyze sales for giant retailers, or upload mobile applications in Google Play for developer companies and startups.

Take Atom Bank, the UK’s first app-based bank, which appeared in 2016. At that time, it was a small company that had to compete with financial giants. With a focus on mobile user experience, Atom Bank grew very quickly and soon understood that their own infrastructure couldn’t cope with such scale. So they went the way of the cloud.

With Google Cloud, Atom Bank can now launch new projects or deploy new environments without buying expensive hardware. After they migrated to Google Cloud and redesigned the set of banking software, Atom Bank began streaming its data in real time. These new data streaming capabilities sped up its operations: now customers get responses to their requests in real time, which is much faster than the periodic batch processing carried out by the traditional infrastructure.

Google Cloud has also provided many other benefits to Atom Bank. It fulfills numerous routine tasks such as security patching, upgrades, and backups. This means, the bank doesn’t have to take care of availability or reliability and can focus on primary tasks.

They also enhanced their security level: in Google Cloud they can set up much more granular control as compared with the traditional bank infrastructure. Thanks to this, they can prevent issues and accidents before they affect bank customers. This remote infrastructure also helped the bank cope with Covid-19 restrictions relatively easily.

Atom Bank subsequently released an improved mobile application and now enjoys an App Store rating of 4.8: customers describe their mobile service as easy, safe, and fast.

How does the cloud work?

The cloud provider has a network of physical servers and data centers in different parts of the world. These are interrelated locations that support remote connectivity.

Users access cloud products, applications, and services on their smartphones or PCs, while developers deploy and configure their applications through the cloud. The cloud can be accessed through a web interface, and required resources can be easily obtained. If additional storage or computing power is needed, it can be purchased with just a few clicks.

For retailers and online stores, Black Friday is a challenging period of peak workload ― and this is where clouds really help. A retailer doesn’t need to buy additional hardware to handle increased buyer requests during those days and doesn’t have to lose money because it can’t cope with the flow of customers. All they have to do is order extra capacity from the cloud. After Black Friday is over, companies can easily scale back down to normal operation.

Across the universe

Google Cloud has over 100 products to offer. So no matter what a company needs, it will definitely find Google Cloud tools that will make its work easier and provide an innovative approach.

An impressive diagram, right? Virtually any company from any industry can find a solution for its needs, and all these organizations need software engineers to administer these Google Cloud services. Let’s have a look at a few examples.

Google Storage

With Cloud Storage, companies can flexibly store any data paying for the volume and network resources used. In Google Cloud, customers’ data are protected with access control policies, encryption, and other tools. Besides, unlike data stored locally, data stored in the cloud is easily backed up to multiple physical locations.

After a company saves data to Cloud Storage, it can then create data warehouses, analyze data, or build machine learning models.

For example, 99.co, a real estate company in Singapore and Indonesia, used Cloud Storage and other Google Cloud tools to improve user experience, which greatly depends on the quality of photos and on how fast they load. With Google Cloud, 99.co has managed to reduce image categorization time from five minutes to 30 seconds and increase loading speed by up to 50%.

Google Cloud also provides managed databases to 99.co. Thanks to this, company engineers have the opportunity to save time on maintenance and focus on innovating and experimenting.

Cloud AI Developers Services

Google Cloud includes artificial intelligence and machine learning tools ― Cloud AI Developers Services. They help companies build, scale effective AI models, and train machine learning models without deep ML expertise.

Other Google Cloud AI and ML tools help analyze unstructured text, convert speech into text, text into speech, and add audio translations to content in real time. Vision AI can detect objects and comprehend text within images.

The Zoological Society of London (ZSL) uses Google Cloud’s machine learning and AI tools to protect endangered species from poaches. ZSL installed 69 acoustic recording sensors in a nature reserve in Cameroon to collect and analyze audio data, thus monitoring illegal hunting. As a result of the experiment, they gathered 350 GB of audio recordings spanning 267 days.

It would take months to analyze this data manually, while with Google AI & ML tools, it took just 15 minutes to analyze the entire dataset and detect 1,746 gunshots. Meanwhile, using the geospatial capabilities of BigQuery (Google Cloud’s data warehouse), ZSL identified locations where additional law enforcement monitoring against poaching was needed.

IoT Core

Google Cloud also includes IoT Core — a set of Internet of Things solutions. These tools help easily and securely connect, manage, and accept data from geographically distributed equipment. 

For example, Semios is a platform for farmers that grow almonds, pistachios, apples, and other high-value crops. Its mission is to help produce greater yields and reduce farmers’ reliance on water and pesticides.

For this, Semios installed 500,000 Internet of Things (IoT) sensors across 80,000 acres. The sensors gather big data on weather, temperature, moisture, and other conditions. After the data is processed, farmers can access a simple dashboard that provides useful information for growing crops.

Semios collects approximately 200 million data points from its sensors every day. Before migrating to Google Cloud, these were siloed data that didn’t provide the big picture.

Today, Google Earth Engine combines granular data from ground sensors and aerial sources. The datasets are then analyzed in Google’s BigQuery to discover valuable connections between different factors. This helps farmers fight against insects, water plants, and respond to other risks only when really necessary, thus making their crops better and more sustainable.

And that is just the tip of the iceberg! Google Cloud has services and products for any task ― big data and machine learning, container applications and microservices, databases and data warehouses, security, monitoring, logging, observability, and much more.

This, in turn, creates great career opportunities: naturally, Google Cloud customers need software engineers capable of handling all these cloud-based tools.

The sky’s the limit with Google Cloud

All of the above is proof beyond doubt that a Google Cloud software engineer is a very useful skill to have. On the Google Careers website, “Google Cloud” comes back with thirteen pages of results, while Indeed offers more than 12,000 Google Cloud jobs to choose from. You’ll get results for any location and industry, with numerous remote, hybrid and office positions. A professional Google Cloud software engineer will always find a job.

Google itself offers Professional Cloud Architect Certification. Their guide has information on who is eligible for certification. In short, they are mostly industry professionals with upwards of three years of experience.

However, you have a range of options to start your journey with. For example, with Google Cloud Tech on YouTube, you can join almost one million subscribers to learn at your own pace.

Still, if you intend to build a successful career in the foreseeable future, consider the Software Engineering Bootcamp from TripleTen — a 10-month part-time online course for beginners. During the course, you will:

• Learn in a work-simulated environment
• Immerse yourself in the sprint process most IT companies adhere to.l
• Get assistance from a professional software engineer, who will check your code line by line
• Graduate with six portfolio projects
• Receive free career coaching.m

As an aspiring software engineer, you can benefit from industry communities joining the Google Cloud Community or C2C Global, the Google Cloud Customer Community. There you can have peer-to-peer conversations about Google Cloud, overcome technical challenges, find coworkers in your location, and gain access to useful professional resources.

Wrapping up

Google empowers both users and businesses across the globe. Among other tools, it offers the world-leading Google Cloud Platform, which helps companies easily scale up, save cash, and use state-of-the-art cloud technologies.

This is a huge IT pie, and if you want a piece of it, consider pursuing a career in Google Cloud software engineering. This is a demanding job that opens doors to working in any industry in any part of the world.

There are also a number of education platforms, including the Software Engineering Bootcamp, that can become your IT springboard. Keep to Google Cloud, and you will remain at the forefront of IT innovation and professional accomplishment!