Prerequisites

This course is facilitated for people with little/no knowledge in using the cloud and Linux in general. However, for the sake of time, there is a few things we would like to get over with before we start the workshop.

1. Get a Google account

You will need this to access the Google Cloud Platform console to create your VMs.

Steps: You know how to do this 😥

Needed to create VMs and deploy your web app.

Steps:

Agree to the terms of service and sell your soul.
Click on the Try for free button.
Remember where you live and fill in your country and agree to the same ToS again.
Change account type to individual.
Sundar Pichai is sad. Please send the 16 digits on the front, expiry date and the three numbers on the back and help Mr. Pichai and his startup challenge Amazon. (they won’t charge it, hopefully, not yet).
START YOUR FREE TRIAL

Make sure that billing is enabled and you are good to go!

3. Create a public/private key

This is used for securely connecting to your GCE instance. Use PuTTYgen (comes bundled with PuTTY), tutorial here (we will go through with this in the workshop, you will need a 2048 bit RSA key at the minimum).

4. Applications required

4.a. SSH client (all platforms)

You will need a ssh client to talk to your cloud server.

Linux and macOS come built in with one inside the terminal. You can connect to the machine using this command ssh -i PATH_TO_PRIVATE_KEY USERNAME@EXTERNAL_IP. Alternatively you can use a GUI manager such as Termius.
For Windows, during the workshop I will cover how to use PuTTY to connect to your VM.

4.b. Linux (Optional but highly reccomended)

You will need access to a local Linux terminal for the first part of the workshop. Since we will be covering using Linux on a VM, you may choose to not install it locally and try the commands directly on the cloud. However, we reccomend installing a local version of Linux for ease of use (and speed, your personal computer is still much faster than VM we will be using).

For the purposes of the workshop, we will be covering how to use Ubuntu 20.04 LTS running on WSL.

Linux users: Ctrl + Alt + T you already have access to a Linux terminal 😛
Windows users: I personally reccommend installing Windows Subsystem for Linux (follow manual steps). Alternatively, if you want a desktop interface, you can use Virtual Box
macOS users: Use Parallels or Virtual Box. Alternatively you can try setting up QEMU.

4.c. virtualenv

Most Python web deployments, and all of the good ones require the app to run in a virtual environment (for various reasons). You can go through the documentation here.

5. Get a free domain (required for TLS)

Transport Layer Security (TLS) encrypts internet traffic of all types, making internet communication secure. Since you cannot encrypt IP addresses (it doesn’t make any sense when you think about it), for this aspect, you will need a domain of your own.

However, you do not need to spend money to get a domain. Here are a few places you can get a free one:

name.com (included in GitHub Student Pack, recommended)
namecheap.com (included in GitHub Student Pack)
freenom.com (.tk TLD, website is quite broken but works on a clean Chromium browser)

6. How IP addresses and DNS work

The Domain Name System (DNS) is one of the foundations of the internet. In short, DNS is a directory of names that match with numbers. The numbers, in this case are IP addresses, which computers use to communicate with each other. Most descriptions of DNS use the analogy of a phone book.

DNS is sort of a middle ground that is used to take the request from the domain and pass it on to the correct server ^{somewhat oversimplification}.

Here is a nice video explaining DNS and Nameservers.