Now, of course, there is no free lunch in life and you have to pay for (almost) all of this, and the payment models are going to differ. For instance, with persistent disks, you pay for the capacity that you allocate, whereas with cloud storage buckets, you pay for the capacity that you actually use. However, the basic idea is that there are resources that will be billed. All billable resources are grouped into entities named projects.

Let's now look at how resources are structured. The way the Google Cloud Platform operates, all resources are scoped as being the following:

• Global
• Regional
• Zonal

Now you might think that this geographical location of resources is an implementation detail that you shouldn't have to worry about, but that's only partially true. The scoping actually also determines how you architect your cloud...

Now that we understand some of the hardware and software choices that are available to us in the Google Cloud Platform buffet, we also should know how we can go about consuming these resources. We have multiple following choices:

• One really handy way is using the GCP console, also known as the web console; simply access this from a web browser at https://console.cloud.google.com/
• Another is by making use of a command-line interface using command-line tools. There are four command-line utilities that you might encounter while working with the GCP:
  • gcloud: This is for pretty much everything other than the specific cases mentioned later
  • gsutil: This is for working with cloud storage buckets
  • bq: This is for working with BigQuery
  • kubetcl: This is for working with Kubernetes (note that kubectl is not tied to GCP. If you use Kubernetes on a competing...

Let's also really quickly talk about how billing happens on the Google Cloud Platform. At heart, billing is associated with projects. Projects are logical units which consumes a bunch of resources. Projects are set up within organizations, and we will get to that hierarchy later on in the course. Projects are associated with accounts and accounts with organizations. However, billing really happens on a per project basis. Each project can be thought of as Resources + Settings + Metadata. So, if GCP is a lunch buffet, a project can be thought of as a meal. You select what you would like to consume, how you would like to consume it, and associate all of that information inside this one unit that should then pay for it.

Extending that analogy just a little further: just as you can mix and match food items within a meal, you can easily have resources within...

Execute the following steps to set up a GCP account:

1. Go to https://console.developers.google.com/ and sign in to continue using Google Cloud Platform.
2. If you already have a Gmail account that's what you will use to sign in here. If you don't, get a Gmail account before you sign in to Google Cloud Platform.
3. If you are doing this for the very first time, it will take you to a page where it will ask you for a bunch of personal information.

This is where you get access to all GCP products. Google currently enables a free trial for everyone and gives you 300 US Dollars of free credit. So even if you are going to upgrade to a paid account, you won't shell out any money until you reach the 300 dollar limit. In addition, if you consume resources worth more than 300 USD, all your resources will be shut down, so you don't inadvertently end...

Before we jump into the compute options on GCP and create our first VM instance, let's understand the Cloud Shell. A Cloud Shell is a machine instance that runs on the Google Cloud which serves as your command line. All GCP accounts have a Cloud Shell that they can use to access resources on the Google Cloud Platform. You can access the Cloud Shell by clicking on a button to the top right of the navigation ribbon:

The great thing about the Cloud Shell is that it provides a complete environment for you to connect to various resources in the Cloud. Also, it is worth noting that the Cloud Shell is completely free for usage. The cool thing about it is that you can directly use the gcloud command-line tools to connect to resources in the cloud, create resources, provision it, and so on. You don't need to install and set up anything. The Cloud Shell...

You learned about the distinction between global, regional, zonal resources, and the SLAs provided by Google for network traffic and availability within regions and zones. We got started with GCP by exploring the GCP web console. We also made use of the Google Cloud Shell and typed out a few basic commands using the gcloud command-line utility.