The goal of this first introductory chapter is to give you an overview of the Google Cloud Platform (GCP). We start by explaining why machine learning (ML) and cloud computing go hand in hand as the demand for ever more hungry computing resources grows for today's ML applications. We then proceed with a 360° presentation of the platform's data-related services. Account and project creation as well as role allocation close the chapter.
A data science project follows a regular set of steps: in extracting the data, exploring, cleaning it, extracting information, training and assessing models, and finally building machine-learning-enabled applications. For each step of the data science flow, there are one or several services in the GCP that are adequate.
But, before we present the overall mapping of the GCP data-related services, it is important to understand why ML and cloud computing are truly made for each other.
In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:
- ML and the cloud
- Introducing the GCP
- Data services of the Google platform
