Google Cloud Platform basics

While AWS is the major player in the cloud marketplace and has been for some time now, over the past few years the Google Cloud Platform (GCP) has been gaining popularity, especially in the field of machine learning. You can sign up for GCP for free by navigating to https://cloud.google.com/free/, and entering the console. Keep in mind that you do need a Google user account, such as a gmail account, to sign up for Google services. While many small tasks can be completed within the platform's free tier, GCP offers a $300.00 credit to new users to get started. 

All services in GCP run under the umbrella of a project. Projects are tools for organizing computing tools, users and access rights, as well as billing. After signing up for a GCP account, you can easily create a New Project from projects tab at the top of the console toolbar. 

Once a project is created, you can manage it's users, usage, and billing from the central GCP console.

From here, we can start walking through GCP's service offering.