The Most Important Google Cloud Platform Compute Resources For Web Analytics
Management Summary
Depending on which areas of IT are managed in-house or outsourced, different groups of services can be formed, which can be seen in the image below. In this context, the term “serverless” is also often mentioned. This means that you are not responsible for maintaining the server, but “only” for the applications and data used by this server. The image below shows “Platform as a service / PaaS” and “Software as a service / SaaS” serverless.
Google Cloud resources
The following resources are available on the Google Cloud Platform:
Compute Engine
The “Compute Engine” is an “Infrastructure as a service / IaaS” and is therefore the most flexible and strongest compute resource presented here. Typical areas of application in the area of web analysis are: machine learning, scientific simulations, analyzes etc.
App Engine
The “App Engine” is a “Platform as a Service / PaaS” and is therefore already serverless. At e-dialog we mainly use the App Engine to provide various APIs. A common use case is creating a product recommendation API for eCommerce sites or an article recommendation API for publishers.
Cloud Functions
The third compute resource that we would like to briefly introduce is “Cloud Functions”. This resource is also “serverless” and falls into the “Function as a service / FaaS” group. FaaS is not shown in the image at the beginning of the blog article, but is classified between PaaS and SaaS.
Typical use cases for Cloud Functions in the WA area are:
- Import / export of BigQuery data
- Uploading conversions via the Floodlight Offline Conversion API
- Smaller calculations (e.g. scores from analytics data)
- Uploading data via the Google Analytics Data Import API
- etc.
