Google Cloud

Google Cloud is Google's public cloud platform. It provides virtual machines, containers, serverless services, storage, databases, data analytics and AI tools that run on the same global network Google uses for its own products.

Google lists 43 regions and 130 zones, with service in more than 200 countries and territories. Two regions are in India: Mumbai (asia-south1) and Delhi (asia-south2). Google says every new region launches with a core set of products, including Compute Engine, Google Kubernetes Engine, Cloud Storage and Cloud SQL.

Key features

• Compute Engine. Virtual machines in many sizes, including a small e2-micro instance covered by the free tier in some US regions.
• Google Kubernetes Engine. Managed Kubernetes for running containerised applications.
• Cloud Run. Serverless containers and functions that scale with requests, with two million requests a month included in the free tier.
• BigQuery. A serverless data warehouse; the free tier includes 1 TiB of queries and 10 GiB of storage a month.
• Storage and databases. Cloud Storage, Cloud SQL, Firestore, Spanner and Bigtable cover object, relational and NoSQL needs.
• Location tools. A region picker weighs carbon footprint, price and latency, and listed services can be configured for data residency.

Who it is for

Google Cloud suits start-ups and enterprises alike, and is often chosen by teams with heavy data analytics, machine learning or Kubernetes workloads. Developers can start small with Cloud Run or a single virtual machine, while larger organisations use it for data platforms and AI projects that need regions such as Mumbai and Delhi for local data residency.

Pricing at a glance

Google Cloud uses pay-as-you-go pricing per product. New customers get a Free Trial with $300 in credit to spend over 90 days. Separately, the Free Tier continues after the trial with monthly allowances, for example one e2-micro VM in US regions, 5 GB-months of regional Cloud Storage in the US, 1 TiB of BigQuery queries, two million Cloud Run requests and 1 GiB of Firestore storage. If you upgrade to a paid account, unused trial credit is kept. Prices as checked on 7 October 2026; confirm on the vendor's pricing page.

Things to consider

• Trial accounts are stopped at the end. If you do not upgrade within 90 days, the trial billing account closes and its resources stop; there is a 30-day period to recover them.
• Free tier is US-centred. The free virtual machine and free Cloud Storage apply only in certain US regions, not in India.
• Cost tracking. Usage-based billing across many services needs budgets and alerts to avoid surprises.
• Service availability varies. Some products arrive in new regions up to six months after launch, so confirm availability in your chosen region.

Getting started

1. Read the Free Trial and Free Tier page and sign up.
2. Create a project and set a budget alert in billing.
3. Choose a region with the locations overview, for example asia-south1 for users in India.
4. Deploy a small service on Cloud Run or Compute Engine, then add monitoring and access controls.