Create a Virtual Machine and Set up API on Google Cloud

Cloud Computing is an attractive and prosperous field of Computer Science today. This introductory article focusses on how to work on Google Cloud to make computation, storage and working easier. Let's discuss the stepwise procedure to create a Virtual Machine and Setting up API on Google Cloud.

1. At first, visit Google Cloud and select the Get Started Free option. This will redirect you to your Google account login page. You need to provide information regarding your college, debit card etc. Provide all necessary information and Google will provide you a free Google Developer account on Google Cloud for free. Not only that but it will also provide you $300 for buying Computation engine. This process usually takes a few hours, but sometimes happens faster.
2. After creation of the account, open Google Cloud and you will see a window appear like the one given above. Select the Go To Console option. You will be redirected to a page demonstrating your first project which is titles by default as My First Project.
3. From the left side panel, Select the option Compute Engine and from the drop-down menu select VM instances. The page that appears is for configuring your Virtual Machine instance. You can give it a name and select a region and a zone (For Indians, it is Aisa-South-1). Then you need to select the Machine type. If you want to run your code on Google's server and need high-performance capacity, then select higher vCPUs. But if you want to run your code on local machine with Google's API, a shared vCPU will work just fine and will cost significantly lesser. For the Boot Disk, you can select from a range of available Linux OS Distributions. Then you can create the instance or can further change settings according to your required specifications. After required changes click on Create. Now your instance is created and you can perform calculations on your Virtual Machine at the remote server. As seen from the above image, from the Connect drop-down menu, select Open in Browser Window. This will open the Linux terminal with your selected computation power and storage. You can also open via SSH keys using software like Putty Generator (which provides encrypted private keys and forms a secure connection with a remote server using the External IP address given in the above image).
4. Now since your instance is up and running, you need to select your required Application Programming Interface (API) from the list of available options. This provides a list of all Google Cloud APIs. The most common APIs used are Translation API, Google Maps API, Speech to Text API, Vision API, Video Intelligence APIs etc. Nowadays Big Data APIs are also used widely.
5. Search for the required API and select it from the available options. Suppose, you need Speech-to-Text API. Click on Enable this API which will open the following page. From the left side panel select the option Credentials. From the page that appears, select the option Create credentials and from the drop-down menu, select Service account Key. Select your Service name (project name) and keep the file type default to JSON and select Create. A .json file will be downloaded with the authenticated API key and credentials.