Google Cloud Platform in Action

Chapter 1. What is “cloud”?

This chapter covers

• Overview of “the cloud”
• When and when not to use cloud hosting and what to expect
• Explanation of cloud pricing principles
• What it means to build an application for the cloud
• A walk-through of Google Cloud Platform

The term “cloud” has been used in many different contexts and it has many different definitions, so it makes sense to define the term—at least for this book.

Cloud is a collection of services that helps developers focus on their project rather than on the infrastructure that powers it.

In more concrete terms, cloud services are things like Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) or Google Compute Engine (GCE), which provide APIs to provision virtual servers, where customers pay per hour ...