Chapter 1: General Knowledge

Question 1

What is GCP?

Answer 1

GCP is a public cloud service that offers some of the same technologies used by Google itself to deliver its own products.

Question 2

What are 4 broad categories that the public cloud offers?

Answer 2

1. Compute resources
2. Storage
3. Networking
4. Specialised services

Question 3

What is the basic unit of computing resources?

Answer 3

Virtual Machines

Question 4

Describe a virtual machine, in terms of your access and other people’s access to it.

Answer 4

1. Either pre configured or customised.
2. I have full access to the VM. i.e. Can configure file systems, add persistent storage, patch the operating system etc.
3. I decide who has access to it.

Question 5

What is a cluster (of VMs)?

Answer 5

When you create multiple VMs. If one of the VMs fail, the workload can be directed to other VMs.

Question 6

What are Managed Kubernetes Clusters?

What can you specify and what does it do for you?

Answer 6

1. ppl can focus on their application more.
2. Makes use of containers.
3. Can specify the number of servers to run and the containers that run on them.
4. Can specify autoscaling parameters to optimise the number of containers running.
5. The health of containers is monitored for you.

Question 7

What is a container?

Answer 7

A container is like a lightweight VM that isolates processes running in one container from processes running in other containers.

Question 8

When are containers good options?

Answer 8

When you need to run applications that depend on multiple micro services running in your environment.

Question 9

What does serverless computing mean?

Answer 9

Doesn’t require you to set up VMs or Kubernetes clusters.

Question 10

What are the serverless computing options on GCP?

Answer 10

App Engine and Cloud Functions.

Question 11

What is App Engine for?

Answer 11

for applications and containers that run for extended periods of time.
i.e. website backend, point-of-sale system, custom business application.

Question 12

What is Cloud Functions for?

Answer 12

Platform for running code in response to an event. i.e. uploading a file or adding a message to a message queue.
Works well when you need to respond to an event by running a short process coded in function or calling some other longer-running applications.

Question 13

What are the types of Storage?

Answer 13

1. Object storage
2. File storage
3. Block storage
4. Caches

Question 14

What is Object storage for and some of its characteristics?

Answer 14

Highly reliable and durable storage of objects, such as images or data sets. More limited functionality than file system-based storage systems.

Each object is individually addressable, usually by URL.

Not limited by the size of disks or drives.

It is serverless, no need to create VMs and attach storage to them.

Cloud Storage.

Question 15

What is file storage?

Answer 15

Hierarchical storage system for files.

Provides network shared file systems.

Cloud Filestore.

Suitable for applications that require operating system-like file access to files.

Question 16

What is Block Storage for?

Answer 16

Uses a fixed-size data structure called block to organise data.

Commonly used in ephemeral and persistent disks attached to VMs.

Can install file system on top of the block storage, or run applications that access blocks directly.

Takes longer to retrieve data, maybe need a combination of object storage and block storage.

Question 17

What are Caches and its characteristics?

Answer 17

In-memory data stores that maintain fast access to data.

Memory is more expensive.

Volatile, lose data when power is lost. Hard to sync is with the system of truth.

Question 18

What does latency refer to?

Answer 18

The time it takes to retrieve data.

Question 19

Where do you need Networking?

Answer 19

need to work with networking between cloud resources and possibly with on-premise systems.

My internal GCP network is defined as a virtual private cloud, which contains all my resources that are isolated on the cloud.

Question 20

Specialised Services

Answer 20

Serverless, do not need to configure servers or clusters.

Provide a specific function.

Provide an API for the functionality of the service.

Charged based on the use of the service.

Question 21

What are some specialised services in GCP?

Answer 21

AutoML, machine learning service.

Cloud Natural Language, for analysing text.

Cloud Vision for analysing images.

Cloud Inference API, a service for computing correlations over time-series data.

Question 22

Cloud Computing vs Data Center Computing

Answer 22

rent vs own resources
good for companies that has a little spike of use, owning the data center is good for companies that can accurately predict the number of servers and stuff and use it consistently.

Question 23

Pay as you go for what you use.

Answer 23

easy to run a large bill for servers and storage if not monitoring usage.

Question 24

Elastic Resource Allocation

Answer 24

Ability to add and remove compute resources on short notice.