Web-based services can be confusing to deploy, and this title attempts to make it less so for the Google Cloud Platform (whose major public competitor is Amazon Web Services). It is written by two experienced coders who have worked with the Google-based platforms.

Part 1 is introductory, presenting three chapters on the platform, Google’s application programming interfaces (APIs), and brief comparisons to Amazon’s services (apparently fairly biased against them). Part 2 introduces, in turn, Compute Engine, App Engine, and Google’s DevOps program. Part 3 introduces storage on Google’s cloud: SQL, general storage, and the Google Cloud Datastore. Part 4 is a brief introduction to big data, specifically Google’s related products of BigQuery, Dataflow, and Pub/Sub. The book concludes with two brief sections (four chapters) on domain name system (DNS) sevices, endpoints, the DevOps toolbox, and architecture recipes for the platform.

This is a text for experienced developers who want to get up to speed quickly before deciding on deployment. The publisher claims the book is for beginning to advanced readers; however, beginners will be lost and those already familiar with cloud platforms won’t need it. It’s really aimed directly at intermediate users. The index is sufficient, while the example recipes are probably insufficient. There aren’t really many competitors out there in print [1,2,3], but the others do deserve consideration.

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