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Web serving on Google Cloud Platform: an overview

September 6, 2016
Jim Travis

Technical Writing Manager

If you're running a website and considering moving your web serving infrastructure to the cloud, Google Cloud Platform offers a variety of great options. But with so many products and services, it can be hard to figure out what's right for your particular needs. To help you understand the landscape of web hosting options, we recently published a new overview, our Serving Websites guide.

This guide starts with the idea that you're probably already running a site and/or understand a particular set of technologies, such as using a LAMP stack or hosting static pages. The guide tries to meet you where you're at to show you how your current infrastructure and knowledge can map to GCP computing and hosting products, and then links off to relevant documentation, solutions and tutorials that go deeper into the details.

The guide covers the following four main options:

Option Product Summary
Static website Google Cloud Storage Deliver static web pages and assets from a Cloud Storage bucket. This is the simplest option on GCP, and you get automatic scaling with no additional effort.
Virtual machines Google Compute Engine Install, configure, and maintain your own web hosting stack. You have control of every component, but you also have all the responsibility to keep things running. You also must decide how to provide for load balancing and scalability, from a variety of options.
Containers Google Container Engine Use container technology to package your dependencies with your code for easier deployment. Then, use Container Engine to manage clusters of your containers.
Managed platform Google App Engine Focus on your code, deploy to App Engine, and let Google manage the systems for you. You have a choice of the standard environment, which prescribes the languages and runtimes that you can use, and the flexible environment, that gives you additional options but requires some self-management.

For each option, the guide provides information about things like scalability, load balancing, DevOps, logging and monitoring.

We hope you find this article useful and it makes learning about GCP enjoyable. Please tell us what you think, and be sure to sign up for a free trial!

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