Company
Google Cloud
Some teams already run on Google Cloud. We meet them there, or we keep the product portable so you are not paying rent on a decision you have not made yet.
What it is
Google Cloud is Alphabet's public cloud: compute, Kubernetes, object storage, BigQuery, Cloud Run, and the Vertex AI layer that serves Gemini. It sits next to Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure as one of the three places a company can rent machines, databases, and managed services instead of owning a data centre.
The pitch is not only servers. It is data tools that talk to the rest of Google, identity through Cloud IAM, and a global network Google already had to build for Search and YouTube. For a product team it is an account, a region, a bill, and a set of services you should be able to name.
What it does
Companies use Google Cloud to host applications, run containers, store files, query warehouses, and train or call models without standing up their own racks. Startups often land on Cloud Run or Firebase. Larger teams land on GKE, BigQuery, and a VPC they can explain to security.
We put it in a build when the tenancy already exists, when BigQuery is the warehouse, or when Vertex is the model host. We do not move a healthy AWS or Azure estate onto Google Cloud because a slide said multi-cloud.
Why we use it
Infrastructure when the product has to live on Google.
We design the journeys first. Then we place hosting, files, and jobs on the smallest set of Google Cloud services that will carry them. Finance should be able to read the invoice. Your team should be able to rotate a key without us. Preview URLs still exist, even inside a Google organisation, so sign-off stays in the browser.
If Google Cloud is not already the house, we will say so, and we will not invent a reason to move.
Built on it
Spotify
A long-standing Google Cloud customer for serving and data infrastructure.
PayPal
Runs substantial payment infrastructure on Google Cloud.
The New York Times
Uses Google Cloud to publish and analyse at newspaper scale.
Target
Has described Google Cloud as part of its retail technology stack.
Snap
Uses Google Cloud to serve Snapchat to hundreds of millions of people.
Tell us what needs to ship.
You use a working prototype before the production build goes ahead.