Modernizing your workflows with Google Workstations

All NOAA datasets must be uploaded in the cloud by 2026, and all on-premises computing resources for NOAA Fisheries are planned to be retired by 2027. Working entirely in the cloud allows scientists to make workflows more efficient, without losing time to downloading/uploading.

A Google Cloud Workstation is a virtual machine (VM) that can be customized to mimic any computing environment. The VM is hosted in the cloud and incurs long-term storage costs whether it is in use or not. Ultimately, workstations are designed to be spun up, used, and deleted regularly. Think of workstations as disposable computers; you should strive to get the perfect fit for your purpose, use it, then discard it, with your entire process immortalized on GitHub and your inputs/outputs persisting on cloud storage.

Aims and Objectives of this Workshop

This Google Workstations workshop will consist of two sessions repeated 4 times each:

Part 1: Intro to Workstations (5/5, 5/7, 5/19, 5/21)

  • Intro to working in the cloud and how it’s different than working on your computer

  • Intro to the workstations available on the NMFS Google Workstations platform

  • Starting up and shutting down a workstation

  • Installing packages

  • Uploading and downloading files


Part 2: Connecting Workstations to Code and Data (5/12, 5/14, 5/26, 5/28)

  • Setting up your workstation to work with GitHub

  • Cloning, pushing and pulling work.

  • Intro to cloud storage, why we use cloud storage with cloud compute.

  • Setting up your workstation to use a Google Cloud Bucket.

  • Practice writing and reading data from a bucket

Schedule

See the schedule page.