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Chapter 12
Having covered GCP, let's move on to another cloud service: IBM Cloud.
IBM Cloud
With about 190 cloud services, IBM allows one to create an account for free with
a $200 credit (no cards required). You can open an account by giving your email and
some additional details: https://cloud.ibm.com/registration. The best part
of IBM cloud is that it provides access to Watson Studio, where one can leverage the
Watson API and use its pretrained models to build and deploy applications. It also
offers Watson Machine Learning, which allows you to build deep learning models
from scratch.
Now that we've covered some cloud service providers, let's take a look at the virtual
machines that we are able to utilize on these clouds.
Virtual machines on cloud
As the name suggests, virtual machines (VMs) are not real systems. Instead, they are
a computer file, called an image, which emulates the behavior of an actual computer.
Thus, we can create a virtual computer within a computer. It runs on your existing
OS, almost like any other program, providing you the same experience as you would
have on a physical system with the same configuration (albeit with some latency).
Each virtual machine has its own virtual hardware, including CPUs, GPUs, memory,
hard drives, network interfaces, and other devices. The cloud service providers
allow you to create a virtual machine on their physical hardware using VM services.
This section will cover how to create a virtual machine on the three cloud service
providers, and features offered by them.
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