Cloud Console

Navigate to https://console.cloud.google.com. If you’re not already signed in, it will prompt you to enter the Google account credentials. Once you’re signed in, it will redirect you to the Cloud Console, as shown in Figure 1-7.

In the top-most panel, next to the GCP icon, a dropdown appears with My First Project selected. This is the project dropdown, and My First Project is a new project that’s automatically created when you first sign in.

A project can be thought of as a container for your work, wherein all the resources are isolated from the resources created in other projects. You will learn about projects and how you create a project in a while.

The center of the console is a dashboard that gives you a bird’s eye view of the selected project. The view is further divided into multiple cards wherein each card refers to specific information.

The Project Info card shown in Figure 1-8 gives details about the project, such as the names and IDs, along with a quick link at the bottom enabling easy modification of the project settings.

The Google Cloud Platform status card, as shown in Figure 1-9, gives you a quick status check. Green indicates that everything is working fine.

The billing card shows the billing details at a glance for the selected project, as shown in Figure 1-10.

There is also a card for Quick Starts, as shown in Figure 1-11, which you could use when exploring GCP services and offerings.

On the left side of the top-most panel is the navigation button, as shown in Figure 1-12. Clicking this button opens the navigation menu where all the GCP offerings are categorized and listed.

You will come back and explore the menu when subsequent chapters cover the relevant areas. Feel free to familiarize yourself by exploring this console.

Cloud Shell

Now that you have familiarized yourself with the web console, next you learn how to manage the resources using commands and scripts.

The GCP Cloud Shell option enables you to access and manage its resources directly from the command line. Click on the Activate Cloud Shell button in the top-right corner of the Cloud Console, as shown in Figure 1-13, to access the Cloud Shell.

This opens the pop up shown in Figure 1-14.

Click on Start Cloud Shell to get started. The Cloud Shell session opens inside a new frame at the bottom of the console, as shown in Figure 1-15.

It takes a few seconds to initialize the Cloud Shell session as Google spins up an active instance for this. This instance runs on the Google Cloud and provides a complete environment to connect to the various resources in the cloud.

The Cloud Shell instances are provisioned on a per user and per session basis. The instances persist while the session is active and are terminated after an hour of inactivity.

After the initialization, a command prompt is displayed for you, as shown in Figure 1-16. You can start keying in your commands.

You can start multiple sessions to the same instance by clicking on the + icon, as shown in Figure 1-17.

This opens a new tab to the same instance, as shown in Figure 1-18.

The Cloud Shell automatically authenticates the logged-in account ID and picks the active/selected project as the current default. This can be seen on the command prompt. Figure 1-19 shows that the project ID is displayed on the command prompt.

With Cloud Shell, the Cloud SDK gcloud command and other utilities are available. They enable you to work with the resources and perform a whole bunch of operations. There’s no need to install or set up anything.

You can see that the logged-in account is being set as the active account. The Cloud Shell is a full-fledged command line on the browser, so you can run Linux commands.

You can see a list of all the commands. Using gcloud <<command>> --help or gcloud help <<command>>, you can check the usage of a specific command.

It displays only the properties that have changed and are different from the default settings. For example, you can see the account is set to the Gmail ID and the project is set to the selected project. You can use gcloud config list –all to view all the properties that can be managed using this command.

You saw how easy it is to work with the Cloud Shell. It’s an easy way to get up and running with the Google Cloud. The book uses the Console as it walks through the topics. Feel free to explore the other commands.

gcloud, the powerful and unified command-line tool for the Google Cloud Platform, is especially useful when you want to script operations that need to be performed on a regular, routine basis. Rather than running the steps manually, you can run the script and free up the manual resources from mundane tasks.

Cloud SDK

The Cloud Shell option is typically used when you can’t download the software on your local machine. However, since the VM instances are spun up temporarily, it’s not a very good option when you have to do development intensively using Google Cloud.

In that case, downloading and using Google Cloud SDK is the better option. Google provides command-line tools and APIs to interact with its services and resources via Google Cloud SDK.

The book will return to its usage when you start working with the services offered by GCP in the coming chapters. Before you go any further, it’s important to briefly understand what a project is and how you create a new one.

Ownership: Projects and Billing

The project is the top-level billing instance, which implies that billing in GCP happens at the project level and not at the account level.

The billing account that you created at the start is by default associated with the project; however, different billing accounts can be specified for each project you create. That way, if you have a bunch of Google Cloud projects going on in the same organization, you can ask different departments or different teams within a department to pay for it.

So, you can have multiple projects associated with a single billing account or you can have multiple billing accounts, each associated with different projects. You use the billing menu to manage project-wise billing accounts. Figure 1-20 displays the default billing account overview and the projects linked to the account.

Figure 1-21 shows the context menu associated with the accounts. Clicking on the context menu enables you to disable the billing account for the project or change the billing account. If no action is taken, the projects billing continues to happen through this account only.

The billing of a project happens based on the services used within.

Projects and Isolations

Not only does the project own a resource, but it is also used to isolate the resources from one another. This means that if users have access to view a project, they will have access to all its resources but will not be able to view resources in other projects unless specified. This is very useful in controlling who views what.

Project as Namespace

A project also serves as a namespace, which means every resource in a project must have a unique name. As an example, consider the actual environment depicted in Figure 1-22.

There are various departments and development teams. Teams work on various products. Each product has a Dev environment, a Test environment, and a Production environment.

In GCP, each environment should be represented as a project, which is an organizing unit of all resources required to achieve a precise objective. So in GCP, the environment from Figure 1-22 will look like Figure 1-23.

You need to create multiple projects, each pertaining to a specific need or requirement.

In addition, say you have customer-specific implementations. You can then have customer specific projects, wherein resources and changes within a project are visible only to that customer’s users and not to others.

Create a Project

Now that you’re familiar with what a project is, it’s time to create a project. Click on the Projects dropdown appearing in the top-most panel, as shown in Figure 1-24.

Figure 1-25 shows the pop up that will appear with all projects listed under Recent. In this case, the default created project is visible.

Click on New Project. A window will appear, as shown in Figure 1-26.

To follow along with the example here, try creating a project named ExampleGettingStarted . Figure 1-27 shows the pop up with the name specified.

Click on Create to create the project. Once you have created the project, it will start appearing in the project dropdown, as shown in Figure 1-28. Click on the dropdown and select the project.

You will be redirected to the Cloud Console with the selected project set as active, as shown in Figure 1-29.

In order to interact with most GCP resources, you must provide the identifying project information for every request. This is either a project ID or a project number.