How to perform Challenge Labs mentioned in Chapter 8.1 ?

You can do everything in this lab in the GCP Sandbox with the exception of creating a new project. However, a new project is created for you when you log in to your sandbox, so it’s basically the same. Of course, if you have your own account, you can also use that – and have the benefit of creating a new project. Best of luck!

I performed the lab as a user on my personal account. I didn’t need to use the A Cloud Guru sandbox. 

One thing to note is that if you’re using the UI, setting up the project, storage bucket, and VM instance take maybe 5-7 mins, but the kicker is that the actual time it took for the VM to launch and a file to be dropped to the bucket. For the full startup script to run, and a file to deliver, it took 27 mins, 7 seconds.

I completed the steps for this lab at least 4 times, deleting both the bucket and VM Instance each time I retried. I even watched the solution video, which solidified that I performed the correct steps. I finally decided to leave everything running, and work on something else. When I returned and checked the logs, I saw that the full startup took the 27+ minutes and when I refreshed the bucket, my file was present.

I really wish the video would have called this out, because it would have saved me a LOT of re-do work. I was expecting to see the file sitting in the bucket within 5 minutes.