Circumstances and personal interest have led me to explore Google Cloud Platform. I want to document that experience here. I started with the free trial and then paid up for a subscription before I did anything.
First hour: I had signed up for the free trial and of course it timed out before I could do anything than start up a VM. So I went ahead and bit and signed up for the $$, keeping my instance. GCP has a console from which you can launch things. I started with cloud-shell which apparently is its own small VM. It comes with the gcloud package of tools. I could do things like see my instance and connect to my compute instance. One gotcha- I restarted the cloud-shell (really, re-initialized it) and doing that, it asks you what ‘zone’ you want to use. I chose one of 3 in US Central. When I saw my instance from within cloud-shell, I struggled to get details or connect to it from cloud-shell. Apparently the issue is/was that the VM was started in a different zone and you need to specify that when using gcloud.
Now inside my VM (vanilla debian). Nothing pre-installed but python3 (no symlink to python). I was able to install jupyter using apt-get though and started up in console mode. I’ll need to recall things like how to know the right URL to see a notebook up and going.
Steve's Analytic Sandbox 