Google Cloud Platform

Puntos a favor

Google Cloud Platform is very easy to get started with compared to other clouds. There is free training videos and courses. The costs are among the lowest of all cloud platforms.

Puntos en contra

At the beginning compute resources ran out in datacenters that you were already in and using. Also, sometimes features are depreciated or changed to paying for. There is a few months notice on those but still an inconvenience.

Puntos a favor

I like the fact that you can store an unlimited amount of space as an online back up. If your computer has a major power surge and fries, your work and documents are saved and you have not lost everything.

Puntos en contra

I think that there should be an option where you can make the background and fonts a more laid back description instead of always having it professional. I really also don’t really care for how everything is connected to the google—-everything branches out from it.

Puntos a favor

Since switching from using all Apple to switching to an Android, Google products and software have been my go-to. Everything being stored in one central location, it is more user friendly for using and accessing/storing work or professional documents.

Puntos en contra

Some Androids are more savvy to Microsoft products which can be confusing for some as to where they decide to store their files, but choosing Google Cloud is the way to go.

Puntos a favor

My marketing team uses Google Cloud Platform to collect Google Analytics clickstream data and marry it with structured data from other sources. I analyze that correlated dataset using SQL queries. Some benefits I see off using GCP: I can access data online using a Google email address which I already use for other Google tools. I can export the data extract using Google Sheets and store it in Google Drive. I can import additional data by setting up a daily feed from Google Analytics. So, I get the benefits of a relational database with ability to scale using Google servers.

Puntos en contra

Google Cloud Platform is great for importing datasets from Google Analytics and other Google suite tools. But from tools which are not in the Google eco system, it involves heavy lift from ETL developers or architects. Additionally, GCP Bigquery tool has a limit on the volume of queries an analyst can run. Once that limit or cap is crossed, companies have to pay extra. So, using the LIMIT command in SQL becomes critical to limit the numbers of rows. Also, there is a challenge of legacy SQL vs. current version because they use different syntax.

Puntos a favor

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.

Puntos en contra

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.