About 20 years ago, a product engineer at a tech company like Cisco or Check Point could know about all of their company’s products. Today, it would take a team of product engineers. Similarly, when it comes to Google Cloud Platform (GCP), its range of products is so immense (over 200 products) that even as a customer, it is hard to get a handle on their entire product suite.
If a picture is worth a thousand words, then Visualizing Google Cloud: 101 Illustrated References for Cloud Engineers and Architects (Wiley) by Priyanka Vergadia is worth a whole lot more. In this remarkably good book, Vergadia provides an easy-to-follow visual walkthrough of the main components of GCP.
Most people are visual learners, and a book like this will undoubtedly appeal to many people in the technology field. In the book, Vergadia provides visual explanations of each core GCP concept, how they work, and how you can apply it to your business.
A fantastic thing about many of the products detailed in the book is that they have a free tier in addition to having free trials that a firm can use to try these products. Based on GCP quotas, a small firm could, in fact, run its entire business in GCP without paying anything. But as a reader of the book could quickly tell, that won’t scale well in the long run.
Of the over 200 GCP products in their catalog, the book breaks most of them down into the following seven chapters:
- Infrastructure
- Storage
- Databases
- Data Analytics
- Application Development and Modernization Opening
- Networking
- Data Science, Machine Learning, and Artificial Intelligence
- Security
There is significant interaction between all the various GCP components, and the book does a great job of showing those interactions. It’s not just that Vergadia is an excellent illustrator. She also does a great job of explaining the concepts and products.
There is a lot about GCP that can be learned from this book. For those new to the Google suite of cloud computing services, or veteran GCP users, Visualizing Google Cloud is a great resource to understand what is going on beneath the hood of the massive engine of the Google cloud.