Choosing your own adventure

Google's service offerings give developers the freedom to choose how much control they want over the system. For example, a team looking to build a data analytics process can choose from solutions ranging from fully managed (Dataflow), partially managed (Dataproc), to fully self-managed (Hadoop on Compute Engine). On the application side, solutions can range from a fully serverless model with Cloud Functions, managed PaaS solutions leveraging App Engine, the partially-managed Google Kubernetes Engine, to the extreme of running applications on Compute Engine with load balancers, managed instance groups, and backend services.

This continuum of service offerings is common across many areas of Google Cloud and embodies the philosophy of developer and operations enablement. The decision on which solution best fits a specific need is, of course, not entirely so clear cut, but it is worth noting that the services offered on GCP are as diverse within specific problem spaces as they are across separate problem spaces. Google looks to provide specialized tools rather than adopt a one-size-fits-all approach.