Googles Cloud Platform is a collection of many different tools that can be used to do simple things like hosting a basic website all the way up to the very complex like selling real time analytics of datasets ranging into the hundreds of millions of records. Many of their products could easily support an entire 4 credit course their own if you were to get into the specifics and advanced usage. This course is not going to go into anywhere near that level of depth. Instead we will be focusing on leveraging these tools to do some of the more common tasks in data science.
At this point you have graduated to grown up toys. Google Cloud Platform is used by businesses every day and monthly bills in the tens of thousands of dollars are not uncommon. So one must exercise caution and restraint when working with them. Almost everything we will do in this class can be done on the free tier. In addition to that there will generally be small grants available for around $50. Finally when you sign up for the first time you will get $300 to use over the course of a year.
It is easy to stay well within that $50 limit in the class, but if you want to do work on larger data sets you can certainly go into the free credit you get when you open an account. However, if you run out of money you need to be prepared to figure out a way to deal with that. This might be paying out of pocket or finding a generous classmate to let you run your analysis on their resources.
Google is pretty good about documenting usage fees and you can usually do test runs to see how much data an operation might consume. The real danger lies in doing something like running a query in an infinite loop unattended and having that use up all of your free resources.
To the best of my knowledge you do not need to enter in any credit card information if you are only using the grant, but I can’t confirm that because I have already have an active billing account with them. If you sign up for the free trial and get the $300 credit, you need to enter in billing info but you will not get charged unless you explicitly convert to a paid account.
Ask on the message boards if you have any questions or concerns about any of this. This course will attempt to warn you about common ways to end up using too much credit when doing the various activities required in the class.
You should get an email with information on how to get access to the class grants. Follow that and make sure to use your OSU provided Google account. Next install the Google Cloud SDK. The rest of this guide should be ignored because you will be handling different Python versions using Anaconda rather than virtualenv.
When installing the Google CLoud Client Library for Python make sure you are installing it while in the Anaconda environment you want to be in. Having all of this set up will be a big help later in the class.
Individual tools may require additional setup beyond this but this should be the foundation on which everything else is built.