Building Big Iron in the Cloud with Google Compute Engine

Iron Ore

Cloud computing is a fundamental evolutionary step in the world of computing. Using the cloud lowers initial investment, reduces costs, and improves ROI, with the option to be elastic, scalable, and infinitely performant. It's the best of both worlds for technical people and bean counters alike. Google Compute Engine is a stellar IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) example that is part of a larger suite of options, including the App Engine PaaS (Platform as a Service), Cloud SQL, Cloud Storage, Cloud Datastore, and many other services.

The Google cloud allows you to build anything you might need for a modern IT infrastructure via Google's Cloud Platform [1]. In this article, I focus on the initial setup and configuration of the Google Compute Engine IaaS solution. Before I dive in, though, take a look at the many Google cloud services (Table 1), which should cover just about anything you would want to build.

Table 1

Google Cloud Services

Name	Service
Google Compute Engine	Allows you to build hosted virtual machines in Google's cloud. As an IaaS option, it allows you to right scale and reduce your costs at the same time.
Google App Engine	Allows you to focus on coding your application and not on infrastructure configuration, or administration. As a PaaS solution, it supports the Python, Java, PHP, and Go languages.

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