Accessing the Google Cloud Platform

Now that we understand some of the hardware and software choices that are available to us in the Google Cloud Platform buffet, we also should know how we can go about consuming these resources. We have multiple following choices:

• One really handy way is using the GCP console, also known as the web console; simply access this from a web browser at https://console.cloud.google.com/
• Another is by making use of a command-line interface using command-line tools. There are four command-line utilities that you might encounter while working with the GCP:
  • gcloud: This is for pretty much everything other than the specific cases mentioned later
  • gsutil: This is for working with cloud storage buckets
  • bq: This is  for working with BigQuery
  • kubetcl: This is  for working with Kubernetes (note that kubectl is not tied to GCP. If you use Kubernetes on a competing cloud provider such as Azure, you'd use kubectl there as well)
• Another way is to programmatically access GCP resources is from various client libraries. These are available in a host of languages, including Java, Go, and Python.