Google Cloud Platform groups its services into a handful of logical categories, compute, storage, networking, databases, and AI, so picking the right tool mostly comes down to matching the category to your actual workload rather than learning the entire catalog.
Compute and Storage
- Compute Engine: custom VMs with your choice of CPU, memory, and OS
- Google Kubernetes Engine: managed Kubernetes for containerized apps
- Cloud Functions and App Engine: event-driven and fully managed web app hosting
- Cloud Storage, Persistent Disk, and Filestore for object, block, and file storage respectively
Full detail on compute specifically is in Google Cloud computing services; storage classes and pricing are in Google Cloud storage services.
Networking and Databases
VPCs isolate and segment your network, Cloud Load Balancing distributes traffic across instances and regions, and Cloud CDN caches content at the edge. For data, Cloud SQL runs managed MySQL, PostgreSQL, or SQL Server, Cloud Spanner offers a globally distributed database with ACID transactions, and Firestore is a serverless document database built for web and mobile apps.
AI and Migration
The Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform (Google’s current name for what was Vertex AI) covers training, deploying, and monitoring custom machine learning models end to end, and AutoML builds models with minimal coding on top of it, see Google Cloud AI services for the full picture. For moving existing workloads in, the Google Cloud Migration Service replicates live databases with minimal downtime, and Transfer Appliances handle large offline transfers, detailed in Google Cloud migration services.
Security and Support
Cloud IAM, VPC firewall rules, Cloud Armor for DDoS protection, and Customer Managed Encryption Keys cover the core security surface, full detail in Google Cloud security services. For hands-on help, Google Cloud consulting services covers architecture and strategy, Google Cloud professional services handles large rollouts and performance tuning, and Google Cloud managed services takes on routine operations once you are live.