Thanks for a great guide. My Google VM was up and crunching in less than 15 minutes.
I have now moved on to AWS but it's not as intuitive as I had hoped. I was able to get an EC2 instance up and running but it was not getting tasks, this may have been because I chose the wrong version of ubuntu.
Instead of a free trial, they give you a free # of hours per month for a year, but the free instances can only run 1 vCore, so not sure if it will be worth it in the long run.
Thanks again for the great article though!