At this juncture of the evolution of computational technology, we are constantly generating data from more and more devices and platforms. It is now clear that data is a key factor that can give a competitive advantage or disadvantage if not utilized properly. In the last few years, we have seen that the storage and processing of large volumes of data are possible with infrastructure available on the cloud.

In this chapter, we will get introduced to the cloud-first strategy, which enterprises are adopting for performing advanced analytics on data. We will see some of the advantages of the Cloud First strategy, along with the anti-patterns. In the subsequent sections of this chapter, we will see a high-level overview of the Google Cloud Platform (GCP).

We will cover the following topics in this chapter:

• Understanding the Cloud First strategy for advanced data analytics
• Google data centers
• Overview of GCP
• AI building blocks
• AI tools available on GCP