☁️ What if your startup’s biggest sales day turned into its biggest disaster?
That’s exactly what happened to our imaginary startup CoffeeHouse, a small business selling organic coffee. Today I want to share with you a simple and practical way to understand what Google Cloud is and how it can transform a company.
🚀 From crash to cloud: CoffeeHouse's transformation
Let's imagine we own CoffeHouse, a startup that offers organic coffee. We have a website and our own servers where we host our information. Thanks to the loyalty of our customers, we decided to launch a promotion, but our website crashed. The systems couldn't handle large traffic spikes, and buying a new server was an investment we hadn't planned for.
So, to avoid these problems in the future, we decided to make the leap to cloud computing with Google Cloud. There, we could automatically scale our resources and pay only for what we used, all without large initial hardware investments! This was achieved because Google Cloud offers cloud infrastructure services. They take care of maintenance, security, and technology updates, and depending on the service you contract, you just connect and use it, as if you were hiring a barista to prepare your coffee when you need it.
⚙️ Cloud services explained (with coffee ☕)
Let’s break it down using three cloud service models:
1. IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service)
🔧 You rent the machines and make the coffee yourself. Perfect if you want full control over everything.
2. PaaS (Platform as a Service)
👨🍳 You bring the recipe, Google brews the coffee. You focus on your app; Google handles the setup and maintenance.
3. SaaS (Software as a Service)
☕ Everything’s ready – just pour and enjoy. Think Gmail or Google Drive — tools that just work, no setup needed.
📊 Data: Your most valuable ingredient
Now, moving on to the topic of data, it's important to understand that data is a valuable resource that helps us understand customers better and make better decisions. Google has tools like BigQuery, Looker Studio, Firestore, among others. To know which service to use, it's important to differentiate if our data is structured, unstructured, or semi-structured.
💡 Understanding data helped them make better marketing decisions.
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🤖 AI without being an AI expert
Google Cloud also allows you to use artificial intelligence even without being an expert. For example, if you have a small team, you can use pre-trained APIs for translation, image detection, or text analysis. If you have a technical team, you can use AutoML to create custom models, and if you're looking for something more advanced, you can use Vertex AI to create your own models. All of this allows you to automate processes and generate real value for the business.
Continuing with the example, as CoffeHouse started analyzing our customers' preferences with BigQuery and created dashboards with Looker Studio. This allowed us to optimize our marketing campaigns. At the same time, we started using artificial intelligence to analyze opinions from reviews, which allowed us to understand our customers better and adapt our menu.
🛠️ Migrating to the cloud: Keep it simple
Migrating to the cloud means leaving behind expensive servers and moving to a modern and flexible space that adapts to your needs. For example, you can choose 🔄 Rehost (lift-and-shift), move what you have without changing it; 🔧 Replatform, adjust your system to the cloud environment; or 🔁 Refactor, which is redesigning to take full advantage of the cloud.
And that's how CoffeHouse migrated its infrastructure to the cloud using Compute Engine for virtual machines, Cloud Run for running serverless functions, and Kubernetes for the containers where customer information is stored.
The best part is that the system runs 24/7 with zero downtime 🚫⏱️
🔐 Security built in — not bolted on
Google Cloud has a layered security approach that protects your information from hardware to software. It has data encryption at all times, controlled access with IAM, defense against attacks with Cloud Armor. Furthermore, Google Cloud ensures that your information is always available, even in the event of natural disasters or physical failures. But remember that you own your data and are therefore also responsible for its security.
💸 Budget-friendly and transparent
Once you are in the cloud, it is essential to control costs. For this, Google allows you to create budgets and alerts and visualize expenses with Cloud Billing Reports.
🌍 Cloud that’s clean and green
Finally, it is important to mention that Google Cloud works with data centers powered by renewable energy. By moving to the cloud, CoffeeHouse also:
✅ Reduced their carbon footprint ✅ Contributed to a greener future
🎓 Want to become a Cloud Digital Leader?
If this story inspired you, here are some tips to start your certification journey: