Netflix, often considered the original poster child of cloud computing, took seven years to move its operations completely into the cloud. In the same year Netflix completed its move, cosmetics retailer Lush was able to move its entire e-commerce system to Google Cloud Platform (GCP) in less than a month.
One of the reasons companies like Lush are now able to move so quickly is because GCP has been designed with numerous tools and features that help shift existing IT, or roll out new applications, quickly and easily.
Google Cloud Platform provides:
- A whole host of APIs that let you quickly develop applications with complex features, such as route planning and estimated travel times (using the Google Maps APIs) or automatic tagging of images, video or text (using Google's Machine Learning APIs).
- Strong security built in at every level of the infrastructure stack, from hardware to user authentication, with tools to help you enforce the security policies specific to your operations without worrying about the nuts and bolts of securing the underlying infrastructure.
- Tools that let you take legacy applications written in environments like ASP.net and not only move them to the cloud but modernize them to drive mobile apps – without having to change a line of legacy code.
- The ability to migrate existing production applications running on virtual machines – while they're still running – from within the Google Cloud console itself. You don't have to spend time converting offline images or take production systems down while you make the switch, and you can shift systems running on many flavours of virtual machine.
- On-demand capacity, with servers – configured exactly the way you want – available in minutes rather than months. You can close servers down just as quickly. With per minute pricing, worrying about capacity planning is a thing of the past.
- The ability to create development, staging and production environments that are identical, giving you confidence that when you go into production, you won't encounter any nasty configuration surprises.
- Support for containerization, which lets you put everything you need to run an application, including the operating system and dependencies, into a “box” that can run on any machine.
Alongside these benefits of GCP, you can also draw on the expertise of Google partners like Ancoris, who have tried-and-tested methodologies for cloud migration and deployment. Learn more about our deployment services.
