GCP Open APIs and Avoiding Vendor Lock-In
Some people are afraid to bring their workloads to the cloud because they’re afraid they’ll get locked into a specific vendor. But in many ways, Google gives customers the power to run their applications elsewhere, if Google becomes not the simplest provider for his or her needs. Here are some samples of how Google helps its customers avoid feeling locked in. GCP services are compatible with open source products. For example, take Cloud Bigtable, a database that uses the interface of the open-source database Apache HBase, which provides customers the advantage of code portability. Another example, Cloud Dataproc provides the open-source big data environment Hadoop, as a managed service, etc.
What is Google Cloud Platform (GCP)?
Before we begin learning about the Google Cloud Platform, we will talk about what cloud computing is. Basically, it is using someone else’s computer over the internet. Examples: GCP, AWS, IBM Cloud, etc. Some interesting features of cloud computing are as follows:
- You get computing resources on-demand and self-service. The customer has to use a simple User Interface and they get the computing power, storage requirements, and network you need without human intervention.
- You can access these cloud resources over the internet from anywhere on the globe.
- The provider of these resources has a huge collection of them and allocates them to customers out of that collection.
- The resources are elastic. If you need more resources, you can get them rapidly. If you need less, you can scale back.
- The customers pay only for what they use or reserve. If they stop using resources, they stop paying.