Exploring Google Cloud

In light of the climate related issues that we are facing, I have begun to look at one of the significant users of energy, and thus potential contributor to the issue - cloud services.

Greenpeace have a reportcard for services that indicates which are better. And Google rates very well. These are consumer-facing services, and importantly Netflix gets a ‘D’ as it is hosted on AWS. Amazon who provide a significant amount of platform services, along with Microsoft (and Apple) historically have been slow on clean energy and Amazon did not appear to have met previous commitments.

Greenpeace have chosen to use Google over AWS for this reason. Although there was an open letter and commitment on Amazon’s part to address this.

Unrelated, but it also seems that Google’s platform is cheaper and quicker

Initial notes

There are a variety of services - fully managed apps, storage, VMs, etc

The platform can be controlled via their Google Cloud SDK. One component for storage is gsutil and through this you can host a static site. One can also migrate from Heroku (which sits on AWS) to their Google Kubernetes Engine.

For Rails there are a few options including a flexible app environment like Heroku.