Short answers, pulled from the story.
Google Cloud Platform began in April 2008 with the preview announcement of App Engine, a service for hosting web applications in Google-managed data centers. The first service became generally available in November 2011.
Google Cloud Platform runs on the same infrastructure Google uses internally for Google Search, Gmail, and Google Docs. Customers rent capacity on the same physical systems that power Google's own end-user products.
Google Cloud Platform is available in 40 regions and 121 zones. Most regions contain three zones, each treated as an independent failure domain. The newest region, africa-south1, launched in Johannesburg, South Africa in the first quarter of 2024.
Apple was identified as Google Cloud's biggest customer in 2021.
Key acquisitions include Stackdriver in May 2014 for monitoring, Firebase in October 2014 for mobile and web development, Bebop in November 2015, Apigee in September 2016 for API management, Kaggle in March 2017 for data science, and MobiledgeX in April 2022 for edge computing.
In April 2017, MIT professor Andrew Sutherland broke the record for the largest ever Compute Engine cluster, assembling 220,000 cores running on preemptible virtual machines.