| Data storage | Cloud Storage (GCS) | - One global namespace with strong consistency
- Vertex AI and BigQuery read directly from Cloud Storage
- Autoclass moves rarely used data to cheaper storage automatically
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| Notebooks | Vertex AI Workbench / Colab Enterprise | - Familiar Colab / Jupyter experience on managed machines
- Query BigQuery with SQL and analyse in Python in one place
- Idle shutdown keeps costs under control
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| GPU training | Vertex AI custom training with L4 (g2) / A100 (a2) GPUs | - Wide choice of accelerators: L4, A100, H100 GPUs and TPUs
- Spot VMs make long training runs much cheaper
- Billed only while the job runs
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| ML platform & registry | Vertex AI (experiments, model registry) | - Datasets, training, registry and endpoints in one product
- Experiments and TensorBoard built in
- AutoML for teams without ML specialists
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| Serverless serving | Cloud Run (scales to zero) | - Deploy any container and scale to zero
- A generous free tier for small projects
- Can attach an L4 GPU when you need one
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| GPU serving | Vertex AI Endpoint with GPU, or Cloud Run with L4 GPU | - Autoscaling endpoints with traffic splitting for safe rollouts
- Cloud Run GPUs scale to zero, so idle GPUs don't cost money
- Use prebuilt containers or your own
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| Batch predictions | Vertex AI Batch Prediction, scheduled by Cloud Scheduler | - Predict over files in Cloud Storage or whole BigQuery tables
- No always-on endpoint to pay for
- Results land in BigQuery for analysis and dashboards
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| Pipelines | Vertex AI Pipelines (Kubeflow) | - Managed Kubeflow / TFX pipelines
- Tracks the lineage of every dataset, model and metric
- Schedule retraining with Cloud Scheduler
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| Vector database | AlloyDB / Cloud SQL + pgvector or Vertex AI Vector Search | - Vertex AI Vector Search handles billions of vectors at low latency
- AlloyDB / Cloud SQL with pgvector keeps vectors beside app data
- Managed backups and high availability
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| LLM access | Vertex AI Model Garden (Claude, Gemini and others) | - Claude, Gemini and open models in one catalogue
- Enterprise data governance: your prompts aren't used to train the models
- Tuning and evaluation tools built in
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| Monitoring | Cloud Monitoring + Vertex AI Model Monitoring | - Model Monitoring alerts on feature skew and drift
- Dashboards for latency and errors in Cloud Monitoring
- Export logs to BigQuery to analyse predictions
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| Privacy controls | VPC Service Controls, CMEK encryption, data residency regions | - VPC Service Controls build a perimeter against data leaks
- Customer-managed encryption keys (CMEK)
- Choose the region where data is stored
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