Google Cloud

Google Cloud, often called GCP (Google Cloud Platform), is the part of Google that rents computing infrastructure and services to other companies, running in the same kind of global data centers that power Google Search and YouTube. It competes with AWS and Microsoft Azure, and is usually counted as the third-largest of the big public clouds.

It offers the usual building blocks: virtual machines (Compute Engine), object storage (Cloud Storage), databases, networking and serverless options like Cloud Run. Its best-known strengths come from technology Google built for itself. BigQuery is a serverless data warehouse that can scan huge tables with plain SQL. GKE runs Kubernetes, which started at Google before being released as open source. Vertex AI and Google's own AI chips, called TPUs, are used to train and serve machine learning models, including Google's Gemini models.

Like other clouds, it is organized into regions and zones around the world, and you pay for what you use, with discounts for steady or committed usage. In Google's financial reports, the Google Cloud segment also includes Google Workspace (Gmail, Docs and Drive for businesses), so the name covers both renting infrastructure and selling office software to companies.