Creating Your First Machine in the Cloud in 3 Simple Steps: A Beginner’s Guide

Do you want to get your feet wet with the cloud and create your first machine? Creating a machine can seem like a daunting task. However, it's a breeze with Google Cloud Platform (GCP)!

Step 1: Choosing a Cloud Service Provider

Before we get started, there are three main cloud providers: Amazon Web Service, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform. These are the providers, whose hardware you will be using in the cloud. While they are all great choices, we will use GCP in this guide. GCP is easy to use and has an excellent free tier to test without any costs. However, feel free to use any provider you prefer.

Step 2: Creating an Account

To create your first machine on GCP, you will need a basic Google Account. When you first sign up, you'll need to provide your mailing address and add a credit card. This is in case you want to use services outside the free tier.

Step 3: Creating Your First Machine

To create your first machine, go to the "Compute Engine" product, which can be found on the main screen or in the side menu. Activate the "Compute Engine API" for your project. Then click "create instance".

Now you need to provide general details about the machine you want to create:

• Name: Enter a unique name for your instance.

• Region/Zone: Select the physical location of your machine. For this guide, we recommend using us-west1, us-central1, or us-east1 as it they are included in the free tier.

• Series and Machine Type: Choose the size of your machine. For beginners, we suggest using an E2 Series and e2-micro type, which is included in the free tier.

• Boot Disk: Choose the disk and operating system you want to run. We recommend keeping it at the default Debian GNU/Linux 11.

• Firewall: This is used if you want to create a public server. Just keep the default values now.

Once you have filled in all the details, hit the "CREATE" button, and Google will start creating your machine. Within a few minutes, your machine will be ready to use. To access it, click "Connect > SSH," and you can start using your machine immediately.

To delete the machine, select the instance and click "delete" in the top menu. That's it.

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Congratulations! You've now created your first machine on GCP, which only took a few minutes. Cloud computing makes it easy to create and remove infrastructure. As you continue to explore GCP, you'll find that it offers a range of powerful tools and services that can help you build and deploy applications quickly and efficiently.