Unusual Google Cloud solutions for problems that I didn’t know existed

I’ve been this week on a Google Cloud Onboard- an introduction to solutions available in Google Cloud Platform. I was there looking for inspirations and motivation to make a next step in a cloud adoption (as we’re currently migrating our monolith from Heroku PaaS to microservice architecture on the cloud).

I was always hoping that there’s more in the cloud than just pure computing power/storage. If it wasn’t the case- we’ll see everyone launching their own data centers. Turns out, with proper scale you see problems that others can’t. Solutions for those problems were inspiration I was looking for.

1. Atomic clocks and GPS

Looks like Google has solution for scaling problems of SQL databases. They are using state of an art hardware such as atomic clocks to make sure everything that is distributed, is consistent at the same time.

How Google keeps its global Spanner database running with atomic clocks and GPS

2. AI reduces power consumption

I can’t imagine how big is power consumption for large data centers. Significant part of it is being used for cooling all devices. Google has experts trying to reduce that consumption but looks like they were bitten by AI:

DeepMind AI reduces energy used for cooling Google data centers by 40%

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