#038: How to Create a Virtual Machine on GCP

It's hard to be a Data Engineer in 2023 and not work on a cloud platform.

The Big 3 Providers (Amazon, Microsoft & Google) all offer it and it's become a staple of data infrastructures.

But with so many services within each platform to choose from, where do you start?

Well, one of the most popular use cases of the cloud is for computation, otherwise known as Virtual Machines (VMs).

With a VM you can host open source tools, run scripts or do pretty much anything else you would otherwise do on a computer.

For example, over the past year, I've worked with 2 different clients that used GCP and we needed to host various open source tools.

That required me to create VMs, install the tools and make them accessible for the team.

Another example is my dbt course.

Each student that enrolls gets their own hosted environment automatically created.

Under the hood, I'm creating a virtual machine (VM) on Google Cloud and running a "startup script" (explained in the video).

This makes sure that each machine is created the exact same way each time.

So in this week's video, I want to show you how to get up and running with using VMs on Google Cloud Platform (GCP).

Whether you use GCP or not, the steps and concepts will be similar across providers.

Once you learn know to do it on one, you'll be able to figure it out on another.

Enjoy!

What will you learn? 

• How to create a VM on Google Cloud Platform
• Common ways to interact & access them
• Example use cases for Data Engineers

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