Google Cloud Platform

Three strengths

• Built on Google's experience. Kubernetes, the tool Google released in 2014 for running large systems, drew on over 15 years of Google's own experience running production workloads at scale. 4
• A serverless data warehouse. BigQuery lets you query terabytes in seconds and petabytes in minutes, with zero infrastructure management. 5
• Data centres worldwide. Google Cloud has regions in Asia, Australia, Europe, Africa, the Middle East, North America and South America. 1

What it is

Cloud computing, as the US standards body NIST defines it, is on-demand network access to a shared pool of computing resources that can be set up and released with minimal management effort. 6 In plain terms, you rent computing power over the internet instead of buying and running your own servers. Google Cloud Platform (GCP) is Google's version, built on a worldwide network of data centres grouped into regions (geographic areas) and zones (separate locations inside a region), with regions across Asia, Australia, Europe, Africa, the Middle East and the Americas. 1

Its roots go back to April 2008, when Google introduced App Engine at an event called Campfire One. App Engine let developers build a web application and then deploy it "on Google's infrastructure", and at launch it was a limited preview that supported only the Python language. 2

Two later contributions stand out. In 2014 Google open-sourced Kubernetes, a platform for managing containerised workloads, which are applications packaged with everything they need so they run the same way anywhere. Google drew on over 15 years of its own experience running production workloads at scale to build it. 4 And BigQuery is a fully managed, serverless data warehouse (a system for storing and analysing very large amounts of business data) that runs ordinary SQL queries, the standard language for asking questions of data, and includes built-in machine learning. 5

Today the platform also spans application hosting, computing, databases, networking, security and storage, 1 and it's one of the three big clouds alongside AWS and Azure: 24.6% of developers surveyed in 2025 said they use it. 3

We choose it when it suits the job, which usually comes down to where a client's data and systems already live and what the project needs from the platform.

How we use it

We last built on Google Cloud more than four years ago, for a previous client's software suite, and we haven't done recent work on it. It remains one of the three major platforms we design for, alongside AWS and Azure, so when a client already runs on Google Cloud, or its data services suit the job, we're ready to work there.

In Software Development, that means your app can be hosted on the cloud you already use. In Solution Architecture, it's one of the options we weigh when we plan a system, so the technology we recommend lines up with what you need and what you already run.

References

1. Google, "Google Cloud overview", Google Cloud documentation. https://docs.cloud.google.com/docs/overview (accessed 28 October 2026)
2. Geoffrey Wiseman, "Google 'simplifies web development' with AppEngine", InfoQ, 28 April 2008. https://www.infoq.com/news/2008/04/google-app-engine-simplifies-web/ (accessed 28 October 2026)
3. Stack Overflow, "2025 Developer Survey: Technology", survey.stackoverflow.co, 2025. https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2025/technology (accessed 28 October 2026)
4. The Kubernetes Authors, "Overview", Kubernetes documentation. https://kubernetes.io/docs/concepts/overview/ (accessed 28 October 2026)
5. Google, "Introduction to BigQuery", Google Cloud documentation. https://docs.cloud.google.com/bigquery/docs/introduction (accessed 28 October 2026)
6. Peter Mell and Tim Grance, "The NIST Definition of Cloud Computing", NIST Special Publication 800-145, National Institute of Standards and Technology, September 2011. https://csrc.nist.gov/pubs/sp/800/145/final (accessed 28 October 2026)