Chapter 4. First Steps in the Cloud
In the previous two chapters, we took you through the essentials of genomics and computing technology. Our goal was to make sure you have enough of a grounding in both domains regardless of whether you’re coming to this more from one side or the other—or perhaps even from another domain altogether; if so, welcome! And hang in there.
We realize that those first two chapters might have felt very passive since there were no hands-on exercises involved. So here’s the good news: you’re finally going to get to do some hands-on work. This chapter is all about getting you oriented and comfortable with the GCP services that we use throughout this book. First, we walk you through creating a GCP account and running simple commands in Google Cloud Shell. After that, we show you how to set up your own VM in the cloud, get Docker running on it, and set up the environment that you’ll use in Chapter 5 to run GATK analyses. Finally, we show you how to configure the IGV to access data in Google Cloud Storage. After you have all that set up, you’ll be ready to do some actual genomics.
Setting Up Your Google Cloud Account and First Project
You can sign up for an account on GCP by navigating to https://cloud.google.com and following the prompts. We are purposely light on the details here because the interface for account setup has been known to change. At a high level, though, your goals are to establish a new Google Cloud account, set up a billing account, accept ...
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