Chapter 1: Introduction to Google Cloud and BigQuery
The adoption of the public cloud enables companies and users to access innovative and cost-effective technologies. This is particularly valuable in the big data and Artificial Intelligence (AI) areas, where new solutions are providing possibilities that seemed impossible to achieve with on-premises systems only a few years ago. In order to be effective in the day-to-day business of a company, the new AI capabilities need to be shared between different roles and not concentrated only with technicians. Most cloud providers are currently addressing the challenge of democratizing AI across different departments and employees with different skills.
In this context, Google Cloud provides several services to accelerate the processing of large amounts of data and build Machine Learning (ML) applications that can make better decisions.
In this chapter, we'll gradually introduce the main concepts that will be useful in the upcoming hands-on activities. Using an incremental approach, we'll go through the following topics:
- Introducing Google Cloud Platform
- Exploring AI and ML services on GCP
- Introducing BigQuery
- Discovering BigQuery ML
- Understanding BigQuery pricing
