Why Google Cloud for a small business#
- No servers to manage. App Engine and Cloud Run handle operating systems, security patches, HTTPS certificates and scaling. You never get a 2 a.m. call about a full disk.
- You pay for use. Quiet apps scale down when nobody is using them, so a small internal tool can cost very little to run. Budget alerts are set up from the start.
- Security you inherit. Your app runs on the same infrastructure that Google runs on, with encryption at rest and in transit by default.
Making Google Workspace work harder#
Your team already knows Gmail, Calendar, Sheets and Drive. Instead of asking them to learn yet another tool, I connect your application to those:
- Sign in with Google. Staff use the accounts they already have. When someone leaves, suspending their Workspace account removes their access to the app as well.
- Google Sheets. New orders, leads or timesheets are appended to a sheet automatically, and the app can read from a sheet that your team maintains.
- Google Calendar. Bookings and deadlines appear on the right calendar as soon as they are made.
- Google Drive. Generated quotes, invoices and uploaded files are filed in shared folders with the correct permissions.
- Gmail and Google Chat. Important events reach the right people straight away, as an email or a message in a Chat space.
- Looker Studio. Live dashboards built on your app’s data, shared like any Google document.
This website uses the same setup: messages from the contact form are appended to a Google Sheet and announced in a Google Chat space.
Portable by design#
Google Cloud is my recommendation, not a trap. Applications are built with standard Go and standard databases, so they can move to another cloud or to your own servers without a rewrite.