The GCE is a GCP core service, offering a wide variety of scalable VMs based on different OSes. The multiplicity of available OSes, the range of machines with CPUs, GPUs, small to huge disk space, and RAM make the GCE a powerful Cloud environment adapted to a wide variety of projects and contexts.
In this chapter you learned:
- How to create, launch, back up, modify, and access multiple VMs
- The different parameters and variables related to a VM
- How to access and use the Google Shell
- How to use the gcloud CLI to carry out the same operations in the GCP
- How to install a data science Python stack
- How to launch a Jupyter Notebook
There are many more possibilities offered by the power and flexibility of the GCE that we haven't covered. Hopefully, by the end of this chapter, you should feel comfortable working with instances that are appropriate for your projects in a data-focused context.
In the next chapter, we will learn how to store data on the GCP with Google Storage and Google SQL.