I wouldn't recommend using google cloud's computing platform because it specifically states in their FAQ under restricted actions:
Some actions are prohibited during the free trial. For example, during your free trial you may not use Google Cloud Platform services to engage in mining cryptocurrency.
Microsoft Azure (maybe AWS as well) is fine as it did not have any such clause in their terms of service last time I checked.
you could look at it in the gridcoin wording that its not mining... so the free trials technically are just doing science and there is some reward for it but I thought we pride gridcoin on the fact that it is not mining? but even doing a 4 instance 2 cpu core 3.8gb ram 3 months via google really does nothing for you but is a way to start out. the 1 year aws instances are not really cruchers either because we need more projects for GPU's let alone CPU's but this post does imo seem a little trollish like " this how to cheat lulz " but its not and they failed.
I would encourage you to talk to google cloud's team about what their opinion is on whether running BOINC under team Gridcoin constitutes mining (which you can do here). I would not recommend using the free trial to earn Gridcoin unless they explicitly state that they don't consider it mining. I just want people to be informed of what is in their terms of service.
Gridcoin and Curecoin are classified as folding for research. Not going into any details, most of the supervisors on Google Cloud agree with this. But not all.
Interesting, I wouldn't have assumed that to be the case. So it's a bit of a different type of gamble than I thought it was then to crunch Gridcoin on Google Cloud.