Google Cloud

I recently worked on a project which combined two of my life's greatest passions: coding, and memes. The project was, of course, a chatbot: a fun imaginary friend who sits in your chatroom of choice and loyally waits on your beck and call, delivering memes whenever you might request them. In some cases, the bot would scrape the internet for freshly baked memes, but there were also plenty of instances where the desired memes should be more predictable, namely from a predetermined subset of memes hosted on the cloud which could be updated dynamically. This is where Google Cloud Storage

GCP is on the rise, and it's getting harder and harder to have conversations around data warehousing without addressing the new 500-pound gorilla on the block: Google BigQuery. By this point, most enterprises have comfortably settled into their choice of "big data" storage, whether that be Amazon Redshift, Hadoop, or what-have-you. BigQuery is quickly disrupting the way we think about big data stacks by redefining how we use and ultimately pay for such services.

The benefits of BigQuery likely aren't enough to force enterprises to throw the baby out with the bathwater. That said, companies building their infrastructure from the

We've been on a bit of a tear lately on Google Cloud lately (or at least I have), and I have no desire to stop any time soon. I probably should though...  our analytics show that half our viewers are just people struggling to us AWS. Speaking of capitalizing on shitty UI, stay tuned in the future where we'll offer grossly overpriced unauthorized AWS certification programs.

AWS aside, I'm here to talk about the other Cloud in town - in particular, Google's solution to make sure you never configure a webserver again. This is a trend that's been grinding my

It wasn’t too long ago that I haphazardly forced us down a journey of exploring Google Cloud’s cloud SQL service. The focus of this exploration was Google’s accompanying REST API for all of its cloud SQL instances. That API turned out to be a relatively disappointing administrative API which did little to extend the features you’d expect from the CLI or console.

You see, I’ve had a dream stuck in my head for a while now. Like most of my utopian dreams, this dream is related to data, or more specifically simplifying the manner in

The more I explore Google Cloud's endless catalog of cloud services, the more I like Google Cloud. This is why before moving forward, I'd like to be transparent that this blog has become little more than thinly veiled Google propaganda, where I will henceforth bombard you with persuasive and subtle messaging to sell your soul to Google. Let's be honest; they've probably simulated it anyway.

It should be safe to assume that you're familiar with AWS Lambda Functions by now, which have served as the backbone of what we refer to as "serverless." These cloud code snippets have restructured entire

So you've taken a leap and decided to host your VPS on Google Cloud: let me be the first to congratulate you on joining the clearly superior cloud platform of our modern era. I would apologize for being so openly opinionated, but so far I've only stated objective facts.

Now that you've joined the club, you may have found yourself asking the inevitable: "how do I connect to my damn instance?" If you're like me, you're probably not the kind of person who enjoys this as their main solution:

Luckily for us, there are a few

I've found that the strength of Google Cloud's services comes from consistently delivering across a few key metrics, namely reliability and performance. When dealing with SQL databases, it's hard to imagine any metrics more important than these two things, and Google's Cloud SQL delivers.

To become familiar with Cloud SQL, we're going to walk through the creation of a SQL database and explore the advantages Google Cloud offers us when compared to other solutions. We'll also be dipping into the Cloud SQL API to see how we might manage our SQL database programmatically.

Cloud SQL Versus Alternatives

There aren't many

I've been enamored with Google's cloud platform (aptly named Google Cloud Platform). GCP contains the things you might expect from a young player in the cloud provider space; a lot of existing AWS services already have an equivalent on GPC, but the comparison isn't always 1-to-1.

A seemingly prevalent philosophy behind GCP is prioritizing reliability and simplicity over features. It's a philosophy I agree with but occasionally comes up short from AWS's offering. GCP is the first contender to package enterprise cloud computing in a simple, satisfying way. Its clear GCP has assigned UI and Product Management resources to their