How do you get your business up and running, fast? Most startups don’t have extra cash to spend big on IT infrastructure. Cloud platforms for startups seem to offer the perfect solution – an affordable, instant-on platform for running a business, provisioning resources for custom app development, and turning needed services on or off with the click of a mouse.
Startups looking to raise VC funds to fuel growth can turn to the cloud for setting up operations practically overnight. If services are based online, a startup may find that the cloud helps launch a service-based business with ample development resources, then move to elastic compute and storage resources for production. Through reporting and other metrics, the cloud can also serve as a convenient and holistic way to prove that a startup’s business model works. VC’s like that.
But what about security and disaster recovery? And what about rapidly mounting costs (based on a pay-per-use cloud model) if your business succeeds and grows? Or outages that bring cloud services to a halt, along with your startup business?
Google Cloud Platform not only addresses those common concerns, it’s based on the same technology that powers Google Search, YouTube, and Gmail.
Managing the cost of running a startup
As we move into the age of serverless computing, driven by the growing adoption of microservices and containers technology, young businesses have an opportunity to focus on their business model instead of managing everything that their infrastructure entails. With serverless computing in the App Engine suite, Google Cloud Platform (GCP) handles all of the backend management for you. The cost of entry for on-premises infrastructure of this caliber is prohibitive for most teams wanting to create a quality application.
In addition, GCP offers pricing flexibility through sustained use discounts and preemptible VMs for short-lived batch jobs. That means 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.
The need for speed and scale
Google Cloud Platform offers a competitive level of customization, and it 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, in the knowledge that you can always come back to customize your machine types later.
As your business grows, the platform can keep your pain points traceable and manageable while you scale up. 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.
Security no longer a fulltime job
Google Cloud Platform can eliminate much of your IT team’s busy work, like constantly having to monitor security and uptime. 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. So your IT work can be focused on bigger ticket value ads, like DevOps automation and platform architecture.
