Google Cloud tutorial: Get started with Google Cloud

When people think of the word Google, they think about search and the immense computational infrastructure that converts your words into a list of websites that probably have exactly what you’re looking to find. It took Google years to hire the engineers, design the custom computers, and create the huge collection of hardware that answers web queries. Now it can be yours with just a few keystrokes and clicks. 

Google rents out much of that expertise and infrastructure to other web companies. If you want to build a clever website or service, Google is ready to charge you to run it on its vast collection of machines. All you need to do is start filling out some web forms and soon you’ll have a big collection of servers ready to scale and handle your chores.

For a quick guide to getting started, and to navigating the many choices along the way, just follow me.  

Step 1: Set up your account

This is the easy part. If you’ve got a Google account, you’re ready to go. You can log into cloud.google.com and head right to your Console and Dashboard. There won’t be much to see here when you begin, but soon you’ll start to see details about what your vast computing empire is doing. That is, the load on any server instances you’ve created, the data flowing through the network, and the usage of APIs. You can assure yourself that everything is running smoothly with a glance.

Source: InfoWorld Big Data