Google Cloud Data Engineering | Ayoub Bensakhria

1. An Introduction to Google Cloud

Data Engineering

Introduction
By 2025, we'll have more than 21 billion active IoT devices connected (Statista, 2020).
According to Wikipedia: “The Internet of things (IoT) is a system of interrelated computing
devices, mechanical and digital machines provided with unique identifiers (UIDs) and the
ability to transfer data over a network without requiring human-to-human or human-to-
computer interaction.”

Figure 1. Internet of Things (IoT) active device connections installed base worldwide from 2015 to 2025*
Such devices would cause a data supply to double every 2 years. Sadly, though, according to
McKinsey, only about 1% of the data generated today is actually analyzed. The current
situation offers a wide-open opportunity as data holds a lot of value. The potential to create
systems that manage vast volumes of data and extract information from it in an integrated
manner is highly valued at the marketplace (Google Cloud LLC, 2020).
Knowing how all Big Data and ML products function to address some of the most common
challenges computer engineers and especially data engineers encounter is a valuable skill.

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Google Cloud Data Engineering | Ayoub Bensakhria

Challenges solved by Google Big Data and ML

1) Moving the current big data workloads to an ecosystem where you can analyze all
the data easily, process massive mostly terabytes to petabytes interactively, and screen
large historical data datasets.
2) Building scalable data pipelines that can manage streaming data, so businesses can
make quicker, data-driven decisions. Eventually, create machine learning models so
that managers are not only able to respond to results, but they can take forward-
looking predictive actions.

Google Cloud empowers Top companies

7 apps have one billion customers around the globe, the 8th that has also a billion end-users is
Google Cloud itself. Google Cloud helps top companies like Home Depot, Spotify, Facebook,
New York Times, Colgate-Palmolive, and Go Search manage their big data and analytics
efficiently (Google Cloud LLC, 2020).

Core facets of Google Cloud

There are 4 fundamental facets of Google's main technology and a top tier of products and
services that data engineers would more likely communicate with. The security layer is the
foundation for Google's apps and thus all Google Cloud infrastructure.
In addition to this, there is computing, storage, and networking. These allow you to process,
store, and deliver new insights, data pipelines, and machine learning models. When running
big data systems on virtual bare metal machines as far as possible, Google has built a top
layer of big data and ML tools to facilitate all of the hard work of handling the infrastructure
management and scaling.

Figure 2. Building blocks behind Google's big data architecture (Source Google Cloud).

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References
Google Cloud LLC, 2020. Google Cloud. [Online]
Available at: https://cloud.google.com
[Accessed 2020].
Statista, 2020. Internet of Things (IoT) active device connections installed base worldwide
from 2015 to 2025*. [Online]
Available at: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1101442/iot-number-of-connected-devices-
worldwide/
[Accessed 2020].