In this post we try to discuss Basics of cloud , Artificial intelligence in general and also how google cloud AI provides services for the same . Before getting into Google cloud services in particular , lets try to understand the purpose of cloud computing and the resources they offer.

What is Cloud computing?

Over the last decade a lot of services have turned online. Movies, songs, shopping and storage services and much more. Many businesses are now providing online services/shops/courses.

Traditionally to come up with your own online service , you would have required to buy and assemble hardware devices for computing , storage and security purposes. You would have required to build giant servers and data warehouses .

And if your business had to upscale itself you would have required setting up new hardware devices according to need.

Yet another problem would have been handling customer load and also your hardware location to become a single point failure service (as in case of any technical issue at that location , your entire service would go down.

Google Cloud or cloud computing in general tries to provide a solution for these problems. Imagine someone providing a service that allow you to focus on building your product, its marketing and provides you with managed hardware resources , ensures data security and allows you to scale up and down according to the need of the hour.

To summarize The features of cloud computing are:

Cloud Feature	Purpose
Maintenance	You can choose what level of administrative of management you want to handle and what the cloud service provider should handle
data security	Cloud services like google cloud /AWS are highly secure and you can be ensured of data security
multi-point failure	Collapse of a certain data center/Temporary issues of a certain data center wont cause your service to fall down
Storage services	You get huge storage capacities
Pay as you go	Possibly one of the best features of the cloud is that it assigns compute resources according to the traffic on your service and hence you pay for only what you use .
Hosting services	It provides you to host applications on the cloud ,
BIG data and machine learning (cloud AI)	You can run big data clusters on cloud . Also you can run machine learning and deep learning models (training and deployment ) on the cloud

Now we have a basic understanding of what cloud computing is, lets have a brief discussion on AI.

What is AI?

AI models are softwares that can make human-like intelligent decisions/predictions when introduced to new or real world data . Intelligent learning based softwares are required when rule based softwares are not enough to solve a problem.

We won’t dive into great detail regarding the mathematics/Algorithms behind ml dl or AI in this post but lets list down a few cases where online businesses utilize AI:

recommendation systems (Netflix ,amazon , flipkart)
Language translation tasks
Sentiment analysis in tweets, comments and products reviews
Fraud detection using machine learning
Object/face detection, classifying/locating objects
Document classification

and the list goes on and on. Have a look on the stats below to have an estimate of major industries are incorporating AI in their respective domains

Now we have a look at Google cloud AI services :

GOOGLE CLOUD AI

Google cloud provides many services in general. Lets list down a few:

SERVICE	SUB-services
GCP compute	Compute engine, Kubernetes engine and VMware engine
Serverless	cloud run, cloud functions, app Engine
Storage	Filestore, Cloud Storage, Data Transfer
Databases	Bigtable , data store database migration , firestores , memorystore, spanner and SQL
Application Integration	API Gateway, Cloud Scheduler
Big data	Composer, Data proc, dataflow and data stream
Networking and operations	network services ,VPC network, Network security ,Monitoring, debugger , logging
Artificial intelligence	Vertex AI , AI building blocks , AutoML ,Text-to-Speech and more

AI services in detail

Now lets focus our attention to discuss the Google cloud AI services in particular

GCP allows you to prepare your data , train models and deploy models into production.

Also GCP AI and machine learning products helps you to select features according to your specific needs. Below are the GCP AI and ml products:

Build with AI – Products like Auto ml , Ai infrastructure
Conversational AI- APIs for speech to text and text to speech conversion
AI for documents-Natural language , translation tasks computer vision tasks
AI for industries- Media translation , Recommendation systems, Healthcare NLP

As we have seen that GCP allows you to use big data queries to get and preprocess your data , bwlow you can visualize the entire workflow of the AI project cycle from beginning to deployment . Notice how one can build notebooks ,pipelines all on cloud premises itself.