Google Cloud Platform allows our website to scale rapidly as needed, while offering a cheap and completely customizable hosting platform. While complicated, GCP allows power users to run very powerful websites for fairly cheap, and unlimited potential for future development.

GCP is a very complicated platform, with unlimited potential for those who know how to use it; but once you learn how to use a specific tool - it becomes a very powerful and simple tool to use. I currently only use the Compute Manager (Virtual Machine), VPC Network (External IP) and Network Services (Cloud DNS) to run a cloud-based Wordpress site. Overall, once you learn the system, Google Cloud offers a very powerful solution for web management - giving unlimited potential for upgrades & sizes, allowing for localized solutions & access to the full Google Cloud network, and giving a (cheap) solution for powerful web hosting. With GCP, we spend only $7 a month (CAD), and our site runs significantly faster than it previously did on other hosting services. On top of that, GCP allows complete control over the backend linux server; which is a learning curve in itself, but offers quick & easy ways to manage every aspect of your website - the PHP version, specific file permissions, custom platform solutions (such as access to install different Google API's).

Google Cloud Platform is an insanely powerful platform with incredible features, but it also carries a VERY steep learning curve and is not for the faint of heart. While other web hosting services provide a simple interface most people can learn quickly, GCP throws you into the deep-end; requiring deeper knowledge of linux code (for backend management) and an understanding of web hosting in order to operate properly. Fortunately, with numerous guides and support forums/groups out there, it can be easy to learn.

Google Cloud has allowed us to scale key parts of our data pipeline and democratise access to data for reporting; removing bottlenecks in reporting and allowing self-service analytics, but it is overkill for companies that don't deal with pentabytes of data.

The integration with other Google products is particularly impressive and makes it easy to set up. Using Forms for entry to Sheets which sync to BigQuery and DataStudio makes for very quick and easy expansion. Recently they have added a feature whereby query results can be viewed in Sheets for quick, less technical analysis. I was particularly impressed by BigQuery's free public datasets: such as covid. AppSheet is much easier to use than MS PowerApps. They are continually adding novel features, with a natural language processing feature coming soon, allowing SQL queries to be composed using natural English.

BigQuery does not feel like a mature product yet. The UI can be buggy and is not particularly user friendly. DataStudio lacks the flexibility of software like MS PowerBI; it lacks basic scientific graphs like boxplots and control charts and I would not recommend it for scientific data. AppSheet lacks the flexibility of MS PowerApps and is priced per user, making it expensive to scale and greatly reducing the potential use cases.

I absolutely love firebase. There’s so much you can configure, and since it’s running on googles servers, you practically have no down time!

Learning how to use it can be a little hard if you’re completely new to the scene

Can store any large size files and access

Need so user friendly as compared to other cloud storages