From the course: Google Cloud Platform Essential Training for Administrators

Understanding Google Cloud Platform - Google Cloud Platform Tutorial

From the course: Google Cloud Platform Essential Training for Administrators

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Understanding Google Cloud Platform

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- [Instructor] As we begin our journey to learn to work with Google Cloud Platform or GCP, let's take a look at some fundamentals. First, where and what. In terms of the where, it's a constantly evolving set of dots on a map. In fact, I've updated this course annually for several years and every year, there's more and more of these blue dots. These blue dots represent data centers or places where you can access Google Cloud or GCP services. So you can see, there's a number of zones that are shown here and there are some future zones coming as well. Now, if I scroll up on this page, as of this recording, we have 35 regions, 106 zones, 176 network edge locations and GCP services are available in 200 plus countries and territories. So what does a data center look like? What is it? Google has provided some really interesting photographs to get us thinking about what we're accessing when we're accessing GCP. And to start with, here is an example of a data center and this happens to be in Belgium. And you can see, it's just a big building filled with highly efficient computers. So let me go out of this view and let me go into a view. This is of their gallery of the data centers. And you can see, this is sort of a classic example of huge buildings filled with walls and walls of highly efficient computers. So it's not magic, it's not a mysterious thing. It's simply super efficient compute and other resources available to you at scale for a great value because of the scale. Now, if we look in here, it's kind of fun to just look at the efficiency. This is one of my favorite pictures. So this is showing the Googleishness or Googly as they call it, distribution of water and air in the data center. Of course, to run this amount of computational resources is a massive engineering challenge. In addition to engineering efficiencies, and there's information about this here that is very interesting to read about how Google, for example, deals with the heating and the excess energy produced. Something that is very compelling in this age of climate impact is Google's commitment to clean energy. They have really led in terms of cloud vendors, and I think that that's notable and could be a feature in your selection of cloud vendors. They have stated that they are going to be 24/7 carbon-free energy by 2030, and they publish reports in terms of where they are in meeting that goal. So this information is all on the main Google data center and Google Cloud site. And I invite you to review this as well. I think that this is just a really compelling part of their offering in addition to their efficiency. So again, looking at some of the photos, I challenge you, if you're working with a colo or some other type of non-public cloud vendor in terms of what that environment is providing in terms of efficiency, cost savings and reduced impact to our environment.

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