Google Cloud Basics

If you are starting with Google Cloud Platform in this article Iwill show you my recommendations for the first steps.

What is GCP?

In my own words, GCP is Google’s platform divided into modules that allows us to carry out tasks such as:

• Cloud Databases (BigQuery, Cloud SQL)
• Automate ETL processes(Cloud Functions, Pub/Sub, Cloud Scheduler)
• Virtual machines (Cloud Run, App Engine, Compute Engine)
• Data Storage(Storage)
• Use your computing power to ML/ IA (Vertex, AI Platform)
• Connect with all Google Marketing Platform tools

These are some examples of among so many functions, and the best thing is that we can monitor all activity and consumption with modules dedicated to this.

As a final extra we have Google security behind our implementations and special modules to reinforce them.

In other articles I am going to delve into the various modules with test projects but today I want to show you the basics in a simple way and how to start on the platform without spending money.

First you will have to open an account in google and go to the page of GCP, Once there it will ask you to enter a credit card (no charges apply and it gives you USD300 for you to do your tests).

The main menu shows recent activities, expenses and some metrics, in this case it is a recently created project for this article.

If you click on the 3 lines in the upper left corner, a list will appear with all the modules ordered by categories, if you click on the pin on the right it will fix them at the top.

The simplest projects revolve around the BigQuery module which also brings us an extensive database for testing (in my next post we will see how to exploit this tool at the lowest possible cost).

Modules with free tier

There are many modules with this advantage, here I will leave the most useful for those who are just starting out.

App Engine

BigQuery

Cloud Functions

Cloud Logging and Cloud Monitoring

Cloud Shell

Cloud Storage

Compute Engine

Firestore

Pub/Sub

To know all the modules with this advantage you can access GCP-FreeModules.

Keep costs low setting limits on requests per day / minute / user

Tips

• Use the APIs to your advantage but with care, since some enable modules with cost within GCP, all this is managed in the “APIs & Services” module.
• Take advantage of the modules with free tier to start the practices.
• Use external tools to take the platform to another level (Terraform, Kubernetes among others)
• Visit the Google partner portal, there are tools already built in GitHub repositories to quickly implement and put into production.
• In Starthinker you can find many projects to implement with already built code.

Skills to train

• Cloud Engineer
• Data Engineer
• Data Scientist
• Data Analyst
• BackEnd
• SRE
• Linux

Possible Projects

• ETL process.
• Automation of tasks through programs mounted in the cloud.
• Train and put into production models of ML/IA.
• Data architecture processes.

In the future I will do articles putting together projects that use various modules and external tools, if you are interested in knowing more, stay tuned.