Google Cloud Platform knows a thing or two about startups. And if you’ve worked in a startup, then chances are you know what it’s like to wear many hats. (And to wake up the next day and find out that the hats need to be redesigned, and they should have been shirts the whole time). Startup life is complicated. Your founding team may be comprised of front-end developers, full-stack engineers, entrepreneurs, and angel investors that all have a stake in key platform architecture decisions.
When it comes time to deploy your app and grow your user base, you need to start thinking infrastructure. There’s a host of questions you start asking: What’s the cheapest option? What gives you the most customization and flexibility? What’s the quickest? What latency is your company comfortable with?
And then, you get distracted by that critical bug, feature or next funding round and you don’t make time to dedicate TLC to your perfect cloud platform search.
Google Cloud Platform Gets You Going Fast
As a leader in a successful startup, you’re going to play a lot of roles and move at a rapid pace. The last thing you’re looking for is a hassle. And unless you have a team member with the skillset to meticulously manage your infrastructure, IaaS-focused leaders like Amazon and Digital Ocean will give you more hassle than peace of mind. For new users, there is an options overload and lack of clear documentation that makes rapid configuration for a non-IT audience difficult. While Google Cloud Platform offers a competitive level of customization, it also caters to first time users and a non-IT audience through tutorials, clear documentation, and a simple interface. It allows you to deploy an instance just seconds after signing up, acknowledging that you can always come back to customize your machine types later.
What’s more, Amazon has a long history of launching services that compete with clients they also host on AWS. Could you imagine waking up to news that the platform which houses your app, data and business assets is going into business against you?
On the flipside, Google Cloud Platform is more of a supportive friend to startups. It offers pricing flexibility through sustained use discounts and preemptible VMs for short lived batch jobs. Accordingly, you can rest easy knowing that if you mis-guestimated your CPU needs at time of deployment, you can easily cut costs the more you learn about your company’s evolving needs.
In addition to flexible infrastructure configuration, the platform itself helps keep your startup’s scaling pain points traceable and manageable. You can adjust latency issues by upgrading to the Premium Tier, which takes advantage of Google’s unparalleled physical fiber infrastructure that crisscrosses the globe. Or, you can change regions to be nearer to your growing user base to eliminate geographic latency while remaining on the Standard Tier.
Keep Your Data in One Place
For most tech startups, you’ll most likely be running AdWords and search retargeting campaigns, which you’ll probably track through Google Analytics. You might be pulling in streaming app data as well. When it comes time to make sense of your data, you’ll appreciate the user experience and connection management interface in Google Data Studio. When creating a report, you’re just one click away from all your other data housed in Google’s ecosystem: YouTube Analytics, AdWords, Google Analytics, Search Console, Google Sheets, BigQuery and more. On top of that, Google’s recent heavy investment in Data Studio shows that they have their sights set on the competition with more expensive competitors like Tableau and Qlik. This all means less time staging, connecting, and managing data across various platforms and more in-depth expertise as you become familiar with one.
DevOps Automation in Google Cloud Platform
For the early days of your startup, PaaS providers like Google Cloud Platform might even eliminate the busy work of your IT team like constantly having to monitor security, uptime, and costs. By piggybacking off one of the most traditionally secure, reliable and affordable infrastructures in the history of the internet, your team and investors can rest assured that the early stages of your growth will be supported by your platform. Instead, IT work can be focused on bigger ticket value ads like DevOps automation and platform architecture.
After you demonstrate success (congrats!), then it might be time to re-examine costs, computing needs and extra customization available in Google Cloud Platform. When that time comes, the level of abstraction the interface provides on top of its infrastructure, along with the extensive documentation of options and guides, makes it possible for a tech-savvy startup founder to manage key infrastructure decisions without in-depth knowledge of infrastructure.
Google Cloud Platform Is a Startup Haven
Here’s some inspiration. Startups like Snapchat (heard of them?) began in Google Cloud Platform and scaled their infrastructure as their user base grew. Others, like Spotify, made the switch over to Google Cloud from a combination of leased data centers, AWS, and home cooked server hardware. Why? Because of Google’s platform and tools, more than mere infrastructure. The company is honing in on Google’s BigQuery, Dataflow, Dataproc and Pub/Sub technologies specifically.
And Spotify is just one of many startups (both new and mature) making the migration. By stepping into Google Cloud Platform, a startup eliminates the technical headaches that accompany launching, deploying and managing an app.
Like what you’re seeing? Let us know! Visit us here to request a free assessment of Google Cloud Platform. As the Director of our Cloud Platform, I’d be happy to set up some time to discuss GCP for your startup.
