Tutorial: Google Cloud for Beginners: Architecture, Storage, and Computation

Cloud computing is a powerful paradigm to support pervasive applications that require always-on computation and interaction. In this tutorial, we focus on the Google Cloud Platform (GCP). Even though it is not currently the leader in the cloud industry, GCP is one of the best choices for deploying machine learning-based applications. This is due to the advancement of Google's deep learning technology, e.g., TensorFlow and TPU. This tutorial consists of a series of hands-on exercises for beginners that have minimum or even no experience in cloud computing platforms. We will first give an overview of cloud computing. Then we cover some high-level architecture of GCP and how they affect application development and deployment. Finally, we will walk through exercises on using several services in GCP with the focus on storage and computation services. If time permits, we will build a simple application using TensorFlow.