Intro to GCP Recap

Ayoub NEJJARI
Jul 23, 2017 · 4 min read

The second of three consecutive days, in which the GDG-Rabat family gave its best to provide value and better the tech community, Abdelfettah Sghiouar, a Google Cloud Deployment Engineer, was invited to give a tech talk about Google Cloud Platform.

Abdelfettah, or Abdel for short, worked as a data center Engineer in N+ONE DC’s in Casablanca, then as a hardware operations engineer at Google Belgium DC. And currently, he is a Google cloud deployment engineer in Stockholm, Sweden.

Before I get into the details of the event, here is a brief summary of what Abdelfettah talked about:

  • What is Cloud?
  • What is GCP?
  • GCP free tier offer
  • How to setup an account in GCP?
  • Getting started using GCP resources
  • Q & A

P.S. There is a bonus for you at the end of the article. :)

What is Cloud?

In the Intro, Abdelfettah introduced the concept of the cloud and how things evolved from traditional hosting solutions to the Cloud. In short, Cloud is more than a mere hosting service, it’s a bunch of services, often called Cloud Computing services that provide SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS solutions. He also talked about the advantage and benefits provided by the Cloud. Elasticity, Pay per Use, Migration flexibility, to name a few.

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What is GCP?

After defining what the Cloud is, Abdel dove right into the Google Cloud Platform, listing their services while briefly explaining what each service does. In a nutshell, “GCP enables you to deploy and run applications on the same highly-scalable, secure and reliable infrastructure Google have been using for years to serve users”. Abdelfetah also talked about Google DCs network and how they make all this possible.

GCP free tier offer

To not let conceptual talk take over the event, Abdelfettah showed a demonstration of the GCP free tier offer. Basically, it offers a free trial to check out and play around the services provide by the platform. Here is a description from the platform:

The Google Cloud Platform Free Tier is your opportunity to learn and use GCP for free. It has two parts: a 12-month, $300 credit free trial and Always Free. The 12-month, $300 free trial allows you to use any GCP product. Always Free allows you to try participating products for free up to their non-expiring usage limits, making it easy for you to test and develop with these products.

Here are some of the benefits of GCP that Abdelfettah talked about:

  • Sub-Hour billing.
  • Custom Machine Types
  • Preemptible VM instances. (instances that are used only when needed)
  • Sustained use discount on Compute Engine Instances

In this section, Abdel also introduced the concepts of Regions and Zones.

Hands-On expereince:

How to setup an account in GCP?

Abdelfettah used his console to show us how to get started with the platform. He started by exploring and explaining the interface, the most used sections in the platform, and which section provides which service. After that, we went through creating a project from scratch spending enough time on each step to understand and explore the options provided by the platform.

Getting started using GCP resources

In the last phase, Abdel explained to us the various types of storage and how we can use GCP resources efficiently. We also learned and played around with the API provided by the platform, explored access control and privileges of various profiles, and used all the three ways to communicate with the platform, the command line tool, Google cloud shell, and of course the user interface.

To be honest, it was a great experience. The learning, the atmosphere, and most of all we got to meet interesting people.

You are probably by now wondering. Dude? Where is the Bonus?

Well, here it is,

Google Cloud Platform Fundamentals: Core Infrastructure.

A course that is enough to get started with GCP!

Say Hi to some of the GDG-Rabat Famliy And Abdelfettah:

You’re always welcome to our family! If you liked the post, please hit the heart button and share it! ^^

Ayoub NEJJARI

Written by

Learning Technologist & EdTech Researcher

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