When you install Tableau Server on a Google Compute Engine (GCE) virtual machine (VM), you still have the advanced capabilities of Tableau Server in a local environment. Running Tableau Server on a GCE VM is an excellent choice if you want the flexibility of scaling up and scaling out without having to purchase and maintain an expensive fleet of servers. For instance, you can configure Tableau Server to be highly available, and integrate with all the common enterprise applications (for example, Active Directory) that many organisations rely on.
Looking for Tableau Server on Linux? See Install Tableau Server on the Google Cloud Platform(Link opens in a new window).
Tableau Server can take advantage of many native Google Cloud Services:
Google Persistent Disk(Link opens in a new window): Cloud-based block storage for virtual machines (VMs).
Google Cloud Storage(Link opens in a new window): Cloud-based unified object storage for data archiving.
Google Cloud Dataflow(Link opens in a new window): Cloud-based service for stream and batch data processing.
Google Cloud Dataproc(Link opens in a new window): Cloud-based service for running Spark and Hadoop clusters.
In addition, you can store the data you use with Tableau Server using any of the following Google Cloud Services. Tableau provides native data connectors(Link opens in a new window) that enable you to connect to data in the following Google data sources:
Google Analytics(Link opens in a new window): Web analytics tool for tracking and reporting website traffic.
Google BigQuery(Link opens in a new window): Managed enterprise data warehouse for analytics.
Google Cloud SQL(Link opens in a new window): Managed SQL database service.
Google Sheets(Link opens in a new window): Spreadsheet included in Google Docs.