Using GCP for free

Last year, Google introduced a free tier to its Google Cloud Platform (GCP). With a $300 free credit for 12 months at your disposal, it’s perfect for prototyping or private betas. If you sign up via a GCP partner, you’ll get $500.

Click this link to apply for the Google Cloud Platform Partner Credit

Build apps on the Google App Engine

Google App Engine (GAE) is a service for developing and hosting Web applications in Google’s data centers, belonging to the platform as a service (PaaS) category of cloud computing. Web applications hosted on GAE are sandboxed and run across multiple servers for redundancy and allowing for scaling of resources according to the traffic requirements of the moment. These applications are required to be written in one of a few supported languages, namely: Java, Python, PHP and Go. It also requires the use of Google query language and that the database used is Google Big Table.

GAE is a platform, so it provides all of the required elements to run and host Web applications, be it on mobile or Web. Without this all-in feature, developers would have to source their own servers, database software and the APIs that would make all of them work properly together, not to mention the entire configuration that must be done. GAE takes this burden off the developers so they can concentrate on the app front end and functionality, driving better user experience.

Store large files on Google Cloud Storage

Google Cloud Storage is an enterprise public cloud storage platform that can house large unstructured data sets. It provides unified object storage for live or archived data. The Google App Engine can also be linked to it. Google Cloud Storage offers four storage classes: Multi-Regional, Regional, Nearline and Coldline. All classes offer unlimited data, the same tools and APIs for data access, Open Authorization (OAuth) and granular access controls, access to other Google Cloud Storage services and a pay-per-use model. For the free trial, GCP provides 5GB of cloud storage.

Use Linux or Windows on Google Compute Engine

Google Compute Engine (GCE) is an Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) offering that allows clients to run workloads on Google’s physical hardware. Google Compute Engine provides a scalable number of virtual machines (VMs) to serve as large compute clusters for that purpose. VMs are available in a number of CPU and RAM configurations and Linux distributions, including Debian and CentOS. Customers may use their own system images for custom virtual machines.

Analyse data on Google BigQuery

Google BigQuery is a cloud-based big data analytics web service for processing very large (terabytes or petabytes) read-only data sets. Storing and querying massive datasets can be time-consuming and expensive without the right hardware and infrastructure. Google BigQuery is an enterprise data warehouse that solves this problem by enabling super-fast SQL queries using the processing power of Google’s infrastructure. It runs on the Google Cloud Storage infrastructure and was designed for analysing data on the order of billions of rows, using a SQL-like syntax.

So, what are you waiting for? Apply for the free credit and start using GCP for free now!