Set up a Google Cloud Platform account - Google Cloud Platform Tutorial

- [Instructor] To get started using Google Cloud, you need to have an account. I recommend a dedicated account, and if you're brand new to GCP, you might be eligible for a free account. Alternatively, if you're part of an organization, you can ask your admin to set up a learning account, which will be called a project, generally. So in any case, you start at this URL, cloud.google.com, and if you are using the free tier, /free. And you fill out a couple of forms online, and then you will get an email, and you will then have access. I've done all this in advance, and I have a demonstration account. Now I'm using Chrome, which is a preferred way to access the cloud. You can use other browsers, but I prefer to use Chrome. And you need to be signed in. So this is my demo account, and you can see there's the email up there, and you want to make sure that you're signed in with the account that is associated with your Google Cloud account. You might have to sign out if you've got a different account signed in or use an in private browser window. And notice that this account is managed by TrainingXYZ, which is what's called an organization. You might have that and you might not have that, and we'll get into that in a subsequent movie. Once you have an account, in order to access Google Cloud using the web UI or the consult, you just click Console. And I've done that already. And here is what the web UI console looks like. Now there are a number of different views that you can work with here. The default view is a view that automatically evolves, depending on how you access GCP services. So yours might look different than mine. So in addition to this quick access customizable view, Google updates it based on your usage patterns, I'm going to scroll down here. It gives you access to different services. And you can quickly do different common activities. You see information about your organization, the name of this particular group of services, which is called a project, in mine, it's called Lang at GCP Essentials. And this project also has a number and an ID. And you see up at the top a couple of important widgets. First, this is a menu. It's called the navigation menu. This is basically just a link back to the homepage. This is a selector, which we'll come back to. This box is extremely important, and it's a usability tip. Although there is a menu and we'll look at it, it's much quicker, I find, if you're using the web UI, to simply type what you want into this particular search box. So for example, if I wanted to work with file buckets, I would just type bucket, and there would be a smart search. The top of it shows you the services, and then you get document and tutorials, and then other resources that might be available. Now again, this is a very smart search. If I type in the the word file, I also get types of services that can work with files or buckets. If I type VM, that's virtual machines. If I type SQL, those are SQL databases. So it's just a usability tip that you're really going to want to do when you work with a console. Over to the right, we have some more buttons that we'll cover in a minute. And then again, I want to emphasize, 'cause I see people doing this incorrectly, you want to make sure that you're logged in with the account that you expect. Because if you're not, you're not going to have the appropriate privileges and permissions. Also, I want to reemphasize something I talked about in the introduction to this course, which is whatever accounts you use needs to have multi-factor authentication set up. And whether that's from a hardware device like a UBI key or an app on your phone, it's extremely important whenever you work with any sort of cloud account, even a learning account, that you have another level of security on and above your login password, and that's MFA. So please do set that up. I have it obviously set up on my Google account here. But you want to do that when you are actually using cloud services. Now, in addition to working with this view, a common view is the dashboard view. And you can just click here, and that's going to switch your view into these cards basically that you can move around or turn off if you don't want to see them. For example, if I don't want this dashboard, I can hide the card. And if I wanted to move it around, I could just drag it and put this card somewhere else, for example. And these cards are very, very useful in terms of quickly getting information about the status of your group of services in this particular project. So again, a thing I see with new users is they don't take the time to customize this page or even look at it, and they'll be frustrated 'cause they can't find things that they're looking for. So you do want to use this page. In particular, I like to look at the project info and the resources.