Big data and Google Cloud Platform

One of the major drivers towards the public cloud model is that public clouds drastically reduce both the upfront infrastructure and long-term operational cost of projects. This is largely due to the cost advantage public clouds gain by achieving economies of scale. One side effect of achieving economies of scale is that otherwise infeasible solutions become economically sound. As we saw in Chapter 10, Google Cloud Storage, one space this holds especially true is in data storage solutions, such as Google's ability to provide very cheap, always-online, nearline, and coldline storage. More generally, by lowering the cost of data storage, customers witness a shift in the cost-to-value ratio of storing large amounts of data. As a result, developers and analysts have access to much richer datasets, enabling very powerful data analysis and machine learning techniques.

Similarly, public clouds provide organizations with effectively unlimited amounts of on-demand...