Happy birthday, Google! Tech service turns 24 years old

September 27, 2022 marks the 24th year Google has been kicking around, and chances are you’re interacting with Google’s ecosystem in some way or another. Even if you’re dedicated to Jeeves over the all powerful search engine, or not using Gmail, chances are something you’re doing online leverages the Google Cloud Platform in its behind-the-scenes architecture. Let’s celebrate how far Google has come!

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The company was officially launched in 1998 by Larry Page and Sergey Brin to market the search engine. But a mere 10 years later, GCP came online with the launch of a product called App Engine. Google notes the goal of App Engine was to “make it easy to get started with a new web app, and then make it easy to scale when that app reaches the point where it’s receiving significant traffic and has millions of users.”

Since then, Google Cloud Platform has expanded to include many other major services. This includes those used for computing and hosting, storage and database, networking, Big Data, and machine learning.

Let’s take a look at some of those major releases and updates of each year since, in a very brief (and in no way comprehensive) list:

2009: App Engine gets support for Java programming language.

2010: Cloud storage launches (because people needed somewhere to put their stuff).

2011: GCP dips their toes into relational databases with the announcement of Cloud SQL.

2012: Google releases a stable version of their Go programming language publicly as an open-source project. 

2013: Compute Engine comes out of preview into general availability.

2014: Open-source container manager, Kubernetes, is launched! Cloud Dataflow, a solution for cloud-native data processing, is also announced.

2015: Did you get the message? Cloud Pub/Sub goes into beta.

2016: Bigtable, Cloud Shell, Cloud SQL, and Datastore all become generally available.

2017: Cloud Spanner – the highly available, global SQL database – goes into beta.

2018: Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) becomes generally available, along with a slew of features to enable greater enterprise usage.

2019: Newest member of Google’s serverless compute stack, Cloud Run, is announced.

2020: To ease the shift into remote work, Google introduced Google Workspace.

2021: It's all about sustainability! Google announces an ambitious goal to be carbon-free by 2030.

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Google showed they were indeed committed to a sustainable future, announcing new tools to measure, and reduce, environmental impact in 2022. They have also stated they’re working with customers and organizations “across every industry to develop new solutions for the unique climate change challenges that organizations face.” Sustainability definitely appears to be a major focus for the company going forward, and we’re happy to see it!

Google has been a leader in innovation for many years, and will surely continue to be for years to come. So what else will they give us in the future? More multi-cloud solutions? Metaverse madness? We may not be able to predict the future, but looking back on 24 years of achievements, we can certainly see that Google is a space to watch. 

Our Google Certified Cloud Digital Leader course is a great start to understanding how the Google Cloud Platform works. Sign up to access this course for free, along with other great certification courses, and get Cloud Happy now! 

Still not enough? Keep yourself up to date with Google Cloud news and announcements! Check out our monthly news series GCP This Month, or join our Discord to talk to other GCP learners.