We are going to start by understanding Google Cloud Platform (GCP). GCP is a collection of services that leverages the power of Cloud Computing (https://azure.microsoft.com/en-in/overview/what-is-cloud-computing/). Along with these services, GCP also offers tools to manage these services.

GCP has a command-line interface or Cloud SDK (https://cloud.google.com/sdk/), using which engineers can easily manage and monitor these services.

As of March 2018, GCP has the following verticals of services, which we will discuss in the following subsections. You can read more about Google Platform offerings here: https://cloud.google.com/products/.

Compute offers infrastructure to perform user-defined computing. Some of the services in this vertical are the Compute Engine, App Engine, and Cloud Functions.

As the name suggests, Big data provides tools needed to work with large volumes of data. Some of the services in this vertical are BigQuery, Cloud Datalab, and Genomics.

Identity and security provides tools needed for identity, access, and content security. Some of the services in this vertical are Cloud IAM, Cloud Resource Manager, and Cloud Security Scanner.

Currently, GCP has one core service, named Cloud IoT Core, under Internet of Things (IoT) , which provides device management services when working with IoT.

Storage and databases provides storage services when dealing with large volumes of data. Right from object storage to block storage, this vertical has all the services needed. Some of the services in this vertical are cloud storage, Cloud Bigtable, Cloud SQL, Cloud Spanner, and Persistent Disk.

Data transfer services help us easily import or export data from one service to another. The three services currently in this vertical are Google BigQuery Data Transfer Service, Cloud Storage Transfer Service, and Google Transfer Appliance.

API platform and ecosystem offers services that help in managing and protecting APIs. From API monetization to API analytics, this vertical offers them all. This vertical also supports Apigee platform services.

Management tools offers tools needed to manage various cloud services offered by GCP. This service has tools needed for logging, monitoring, and controlling various other GCP services.

Networking offers Virtual Private Cloud (VPC), Content Delivery Network (CDN), and Domain-Naming Systems (DNS), to name a few.

Cloud AI offers various services that are needed to add Artificial Intelligence to our applications. Cloud-based machine learning, Cloud Vision API, and Cloud Speech API are some of these services.

Last, but not the least, the developer tools provides all the essential tools developers need to quickly bring up an application or a solution on top of GCP. Some of the software under this offering includes container registry, Cloud Test Lab, Cloud Tools for Eclipse, and Cloud SDK.

In this book, we are going to work closely with the Cloud AI vertical. In the next section, we are going to look at the what and the why of Cloud AI.