GCP Core Services

Compute Engine — VMs

Same idea as AWS EC2:

gcloud compute instances create web-01 \
  --zone=asia-south1-a --machine-type=e2-micro --image-family=debian-12

Special sauce: live migration — Google can move a running VM between hosts without downtime. AWS cannot do that.

Cloud Storage — object storage

Buckets + objects, same idea as S3. Storage classes:

• Standard (hot data),
• Nearline (accessed monthly),
• Coldline (accessed yearly),
• Archive (legal retention).

gsutil mb -l asia-south1 gs://my-notes-bucket
gsutil cp lecture.pdf gs://my-notes-bucket/

BigQuery — SQL on petabytes

BigQuery is a serverless data warehouse. Load billions of rows, query with plain SQL, pay per TB scanned.

SELECT category, COUNT(*) AS n
FROM   `project.dataset.articles`
GROUP BY category
ORDER BY n DESC
LIMIT 10;

Real magic: no server to provision, no cluster to size. You literally just SQL.

Real-world example

A college data-science project: dump a 500GB CSV into Cloud Storage, load into BigQuery in 30 seconds, run all your analysis in the browser. Cost for the whole semester: under $5.