Provisioning a VM on GCP
It is always preferable to have a local environment that you can use to work on the exercises in this book. However, we understand that not everyone has the required compute resources available in their local machines. So, let's go to the cloud! You can provision just the right machine that you need for the exercises, in the cloud, and for free. For instance, Google Cloud gives United States dollars (USD) $300 worth of credit to new accounts. Other cloud providers such as AWS and Azure also give a similar free tier account, and it is up to you to select the cloud provider of your choice. For provisioning the VM we need for this book, however, we will use Google Cloud.
Once you have the account details sorted, use the following steps to provision a VM in your account. Just do not forget to stop the VM instance after you have completed a session to avoid getting billed for the hours that you are not using your machine.
The following instruction will...