Continuous monitoring in the cloud is crucial for detecting and mitigating security threats, ensuring data protection, and maintaining compliance with regulations. It's not primarily about cost reduction or monitoring competitors.

Google Cloud Functions can be triggered by events from Google Cloud Pub/Sub, making it easy to build event-driven applications.

AWS Redshift is designed for data warehousing and analytics, offering columnar storage and parallel processing for improved performance.

When facing a tight deadline to exit a data center, 'Rehost' (lift and shift) might be prioritized, even if it doesn't yield immediate cloud optimization benefits, as it's the quickest and least disruptive approach.

SaaS eliminates the need for individual servers and maintenance. Users don't have to worry about the physical infrastructure, as it's managed by the SaaS provider.

AWS IoT Core is a managed cloud service designed to connect IoT devices to the cloud, making it suitable for IoT applications. It provides features for device communication, security, and data management.

In Google Cloud Functions, Go generally has the fastest cold start initialization time due to its efficient runtime. This is important for minimizing latency.

PCI DSS (Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard) is a comprehensive set of security standards designed to protect credit card information and ensure that companies maintain a secure environment when handling such data.

The back end in cloud computing is responsible for managing servers, handling data, and executing the core functionalities of the application. It's the "invisible" part.

Google Cloud's counterpart to AWS RDS is CloudSQL, which offers managed relational databases like MySQL and PostgreSQL.