First Time Experience with Google Cloud Platform (GCP)

Yesterday I attended the Google Cloud Platform Fundamentals: Core Infrastructure at one of Google’s offices in London, Victoria. I actively practise evangelism for IaaS + Citrix + SDWAN technologies in my work and personal life (conversations around a Braai aka BBQ etc).

I first began evangelising IaaS without recognising it at first as a managed public cloud service powered by VMWare vCloud Director working for an MSP on edge of the City of London in a (priority) Tier 3 data centre and world wide Tier 1 IP transit carrier with the benefit of working with a world class engineering team and learning from some engineers whom built the core of the internet so I have learnt a substantial amount over those years and therefore I’m NOT easily impressed by blinking lights in a rack in your average data centre my experience expectation is Mount Everest.

I’m identifying here when I say Mount Everest as an Experience with major hyper-scale internet players so when I say Apples to Apples I mean we are comparing Apples that come from the same tree type. Our next door neighbours in the data centre where the worlds first major search platform that isn’t as big anymore and one of Germanys telecom P!nk Purplish giants, so naturally I’m not very easily impressed.

I also am not easily impressed with IaaS platforms + providers stacks, why? I still believe today that the best ever offering from VMware and one they never fully unlocked due to a narrow hypervisor focus in my opinion and a thought I often ponder over who would be the major IaaS players today if this was unlocked a decade ago as it was way ahead of it’s time and maybe that is why? Or was it because the operational model of true PAYG or Active Use Consumption wasn’t a fully established financial model to commoditize from vendor to customer?

Why I am telling you all this? Yesterday I attended a free professionally Google lead training course on the GCP Fundamentals it become clear to me, that everything vCloud was/is you can deploy, manage, scale as NEWS (North East West South) and more natively from a public cloud platform + provider such as Google but most importantly you can consume it as a “Managed” Public Cloud solution it’s that granular including major hyper-scale capabilities, services + network POP's (Point of Presence) high availability including owning + managing a significant stake in the world’s undersea IP transit cables with sea fleet to manage it (think about the sea fleet for a moment).

For me vCloud still is a major advantage for VMware (I wonder if they recognise it yet?) to offer a managed Public Cloud style IT + Business operational model in house for organisations, all that is lacking really to get going minus any features requests to vCloud is support for true hyper-scale modular h/w of today’s native public clouds on-premises and I’m not referring to HCI but to an HP style cartridge model (but must be native in reality to IaaS h/w) which is effectively how public clouds operate at scale today but with customised + comoditised h/w.

I actively consume AWS EC2 for my own personal home lab (why build stuff at home? No noise No extra power charges for cooling in summer e.t.c), at work I consume Azure and now it looks like GCP will be my Serverless + Compute (new Citrix Cloud RL) + Kubernetes extending my personal paid for G-Suite account (I’m still a web developer let that sink in) to GCP.

The views expressed here are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views of Citrix