The public cloud is an exciting and rapidly changing technology arena. With so many organizations either already leveraging public clouds or looking to make the transition, providers are in a constant arms race to win and retain customer business. This is great for customers, as it drives down costs and pushes cloud providers to deliver the products and services customers need to succeed in the cloud.
Amazon, Microsoft, and Google all offer excellent public cloud platforms, and choosing the right one for your needs is an important decision. Google looks to stand out as a leader in scalable managed services and big data. Google offers customers access to many of the same tools Google uses internally. By leveraging their wealth of knowledge and experience in running major services such as Search and Gmail, Google has built a platform that offers a high level of scalability and reliability. As we'll see in the following chapters, Google Cloud Platform makes it easy to build powerful cloud-based solutions.
