Google Cloud Platform (GCP) is the challenger brand in the cloud space, trying to make room for itself in a market dominated by AWS and Azure.

Ease of use, usage based billing and discounts and some really powerful machine learning tools is how GCP is differentiating itself amongst the competition who have been around for longer.

For those who have never used the cloud to build apps, perform data collection and transformation or machine learning, GCP is a good place to start because it is easy to use and simple to understand.

So if you wanted to get started, what should you do?

$300 free monthly credit

Google is encouraging people to tinker with their tools and is giving everyone $300 to play with in their accounts each month. These credits are renewed each month and if your application doesn’t use more than this, you don’t pay anything at all.

GCP has a hybrid cloud approach and is based heavily on open source software and frameworks, which allows you to try using the tools without a big investment of time or money. You don’t need to shift all your workloads to GCP immediately just to see the benefits.

A good place to start is with BigQuery, the data warehouse product that allows you to ingest data from various sources to query it. Once in BigQuery it can be used by other GCP services.

Getting started help

Google has tried to make it as easy as possible for developers to understand their tools and to build useful applications on GCP.

The “Getting Started with Google Cloud Platform” page is an excellent place to start and features help files, quick start tutorials, sample projects and helpful videos.

Beyond the getting started guide, there is also information on how GCP works and well documented help files for all their products at Google Developers.

Free comparison from VMWare and AWS

If you were interested to know how much GCP could save you on your current work loads, but you are too busy to calculate it, NGIS can run a free appraisal through Cloud Physics. 

Cloud Physics can listen to your server metadata and work out which of your workloads are at risk due to infrastructure obsolescence and calculate where you could be saving money running your current workloads on GCP.

The obligation-free assessment is a good way to start the conversation about where you have risk in the business and how you can get more value from using the cloud. 

To find out more about the Cloud Physics appraisals, get in touch with our Google Maps technology partner, Liveli.