Let's go back to the conversation we had on compute options in general at the start of the preceding chapter. We had discussed that there is a range, from IaaS through to SaaS. We had also spoken about how the IaaS offerings on the cloud make provisioning infra really simple. PaaS offerings allow us to just focus on writing code, without having to deal with the infrastructure. The SaaS offerings go a step further and give us functionality without even writing code:

The GCP IaaS offering, which we discussed at length, is the Google Compute Engine (GCE), which allows us to provision VMs really easily. In this chapter, we will discuss the remaining four compute options on the GCP, all of which range from IaaS through PaaS (there aren't really strong SaaS offerings on the GCP just yet). The topics we will touch upon include:

• Containers, Kubernetes, and the Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE)
• Using Google App Engine Flex
• Using Google App Engine Standard