As enterprises increasingly turn to the public cloud to build and run their applications, tools such as the Forrester Public Cloud Development Platform Wave have become an important way for developers to evaluate and compare functionality across cloud providers.

Today, Forrester named Google Cloud a Leader in its report, The Forrester Wave: Full-Stack Public Cloud Development Platforms, North America Q2, 2018. We believe this recognition reflects our commitment to building a better cloud: one that lets you innovate and deliver great products and services faster to your end users.

In its report, Forrester noted six key strengths for Google Cloud. Here’s a little more on these areas, and what they mean for you.

1. Investments in global infrastructure

As Forrester mentions in its report, Google Cloud “invests more in global infrastructure annually than nearly any other cloud platform.” Over the past three years, Google has expanded its global infrastructure footprint with cumulative capex of $30.9 billion. This includes adding new data centers, points of presence and fiber optic networks to connect Google Cloud customers reliably, and securely, around the world.

2. A fully-managed serverless platform

Forrester cited that a growing number of enterprises recognize our ambition to “lead in serverless platforms.” Serverless computing frees you from worrying about managing underlying infrastructure, scaling instances or paying up front for resources you might not need. GCP’s fully managed serverless platform lets you build end-to-end serverless applications through services like App Engine and Cloud Functions Datastore and Machine Learning Engine . Features like zero config deployments, auto-scaling, zero server management and traffic splitting enable you to focus on building great applications without the hassle of managing them.

3. Maximizing developer productivity

Forrester’s report also cites our aim to reduce friction from cloud-native development, maximizing developer productivity with zero-configuration infrastructure, a demonstrated commitment to open source, and fully-managed services . We want to remove anxiety from application development while providing a compelling user experience. This means you can bring your own languages, runtimes, libraries and frameworks to GCP, or choose from one of the popular languages we support out of the box. Our continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD) offerings help you go from source to build test and deploy seamlessly, regardless of whether you’re running multi-cloud deployments, on-prem clusters, or on GCP.

4. Robust data and machine learning services

Our Machine Learning services are being adopted by a growing number of traditional enterprise customers, and Forrester took notice. We’ve worked hard to make data, analytics and intelligence as accessible as possible, which is why GCP lets you combine cloud-native services with open source tools as needed. Deep learning benchmarks have shown that GCP’s ML service excels in training performance and accuracy. Additionally, GCP customers rely on the same ML services and infrastructure that we use internally for major Google applications like Gmail, YouTube and Photos.

5. Transparent pricing

Forrester’s report notes that GCP pricing “is fully pay-as-you-go and transparent.” We’ve worked hard to make our pricing as approachable as possible. We offer features like sustained use discounts, per-second billing, custom machine types and committed use discounts to help you get the most from your resources. In addition, there are no upfront costs or termination fees, so you won’t get stuck in long term contracts or configurations that no longer serve your needs. Due to our scale, efficiency, and discounting structure, the cost of GCP can be as much as 50% less than other cloud providers for many compute use cases.

6. The GCP ecosystem

In its report, Forrester notes that our partner ecosystem has expanded dramatically in the last two years. Our global partnerships with companies like SAP, Red Hat, Pivotal, Gitlab, and IBM are an important way that we serve our customers, and we’ll be continuing to add new partnerships, as well as expanding existing ones, over the coming months.

Feedback matters to us, regardless of whether it comes from organizations like Forrester or everyday users. Here are a few things we've heard from our customers.

"Google has the best serverless story right now. We've been a little bit on the bleeding edge with Google but so far it's worked out well." —Nick Rockwell, CTO, New York Times

"We don’t have to work hard to get an answer, as Google does most of the heavy lifting and scaling with the data." —Paul Clarke, Chief Technology Officer, Ocado

"With the help of Google Cloud Platform, we are changing the fundamental business model of selling lighting to consumers." —George Yianni, Head of Technology, Home Systems, Philips Lighting

"Moving to Google Cloud Platform helps us quickly launch new services and features for a changing market." —Garrett Plasky, Technical Operations Manager, Evernote

You can download the full Forrester Public Cloud Development Platform Wave, Q2 2018 report here (requires an email address). To learn more about GCP, visit our website, and sign up for a free trial.





1 Combination of list price differences, automatic sustained use discounts, and right size recommendations.

