March 9, 2017 // By Andy Wu
When it comes to public cloud service providers, most IT professionals will undoubtedly think it is a two horse race between AWS and Microsoft. Not too long ago, we at Magenic would probably fall in the same line of thinking. However, after having the opportunity to work on Google Cloud Platform (GCP) for the last couple of projects, I am here to encourage you to reconsider this thinking to include Google as the third horse in this race.
While one can argue whether GCP has any gaps to fill in terms of cloud feature sets or not, the hiring of Diane Greene, a Co-Founder of VMWare, as the leader of their cloud platform has very much solidified Google’s seriousness in going after the enterprise cloud market. Over the past couple of years, the results have indeed proven they’ve made significant progress, as one would expect from a powerhouse company like Google.
As a testament to Google's effort in winning the enterprise cloud space, they invited Magenic Technologies, a long time Microsoft Partner, to test-drive their platform and their claim about warranting considerations when it comes to selecting cloud service provider for Windows Workload. We were quite happy to accept the invitation. The engagement took place in two parts, with each part calling for Magenic to test-drive GCP with a specific Use Case in mind. It was required that each of the Use Cases sufficiently exercise and perhaps even stretch GCP's capability as it compares to the other leading cloud providers. At the end of each Use Case development, Magenic fully documented the experience in a Whitepaper and put all the associated code artifacts on GitHub for others to examine and experiment.
First Use Case:
This Use Case called for us to migrate an application that is near and dear to us here at Magenic, MyVote, onto GCP. Used as a teaching and demonstration vehicle at many Microsoft-centric Developer Conferences, MyVote is a Mobile and Web Application suite developed in-house that has been refined over the years. In addition to teaching developers the advanced techniques for Web and Mobile developments, we have added the topics of Cloud and DevOps in recent years in keeping up with Developers' interests and passions. Up to this point, however, MyVote was somewhat optimized for Azure only, so it was definitely an interesting exercise for us to make it run smoothly in GCP. One can read the full details of the migration process and our findings here.
Second Use Case:
This Use Case should resonate with many IT Professionals: lift-and-shift legacy application onto the Cloud. The base requirement called for lifting an on-premise ASP.NET application with Windows Authentication onto GCP with minimal to no code change. Once that was successfully accomplished, we added High-Availability (HA) to the SQL Server instance running in GCP. As a final requirement, we improved the application’s availability as well as the company’s disaster recoverability (DR) by extending the on-premise AD into the cloud. Full details of this Use Case can be read here.
At the end of these engagements, we were thoroughly impressed by the platform capability as it compares to AWS and Azure. In particular, we love GCP portal's simplicity and clarity. These were great engagements for us as we got to work closely with Google to iron out some beta issues and it served as a great learning experience for us - a true win-win for both companies. If your company is curious about what GCP has to offer or want an objective opinion on whether it is the right vendor to choose for the workload you have in mind, we have the experience and expertise to help drive that decision.