GCP CONSOLE WALKTHROUGH
Google cloud console is a powerful all-in-one platform to manage your google cloud resources regardless of their data center location. It is a dashboard where you configure billing accounts, create and manage projects and manage all of your google cloud resources. The console also shows you your project, project ID, and a unique project number.
GCP resources are fundamental components that make up the google cloud services. They are organized hierarchically using projects and folders and all resources must belong to at least one project.
Before using the Google cloud console, you will need a google account, you can a new account or use an existing one. You also need to create a project as every instance you create belongs to a google cloud project and a project can have one or more instances.
Every product and every service is on the console left-hand menu with dashboards, detailed configurations, and settings. You will also find interactive getting started guides and quickstart experiences right from inside the console.
The main categories that Google cloud offers include: computing, storage, networking, operations, tools, big data, and artificial intelligence.
With the activity stream, you will be able to understand all the activities that occur across your GCP resources in one place. You can see which projects have been updated, what your teammates are doing, or added access to your GCP resources. You can also filter to see what you need.
The search bar in the cloud console allows you to quickly access Google cloud products and any of your resources across GCP.
The APIs and services section is where you can manage the hundreds of APIs that GCP provides, enable or disable a service, generate or revoke credentials, monitor requests, etc.
If you ever get stuck or need help navigating the world of GCP, the support team is ready to help. Support cases regarding both development and production issues are all accessible in the navigation menu.
Google cloud identity and access management enable you to manage and create permissions for your GCP resources. As your team grows you can grant access to teammates using the IAM and admin section. Add users, groups, or service accounts and assign them any number of roles to grant them the permissions they need.
The cloud console also offers a marketplace with ready-to-go software stacks to accelerate development so you spend less time installing and more time developing. This allows you to deploy production-grade solutions in a few clicks with a single bill for all of your google cloud and third-party costs.
There are many ways to interact with GCP. The Google Cloud Console runs in a browser, so you don’t need to install anything to use it. Alternatively, you can install the SDK, which stands for Software Development Kit. The SDK includes a collection of client libraries that your applications can use to interact with GCP services.
Another way is by using the cloud shell command-line interface.
Google cloud shell provides you with command-line access to your google cloud resources directly from your browser. You can easily manage your products and resources without having to install anything in your system.
Cloud shell is accessible right from your browser in the console and is powered by a small virtual machine with persistent disk space and up-to-date software for all your development needs. It even comes with a web editor
The billing section of the cloud console is where you manage billing accounts and link your projects to them. A billing account is essentially a payment method(one or more credit card details or banking details). Projects not attached to a billing account will not be able to access GCP resources. You can also change the billing account at any point in time. You can set budget alerts to help you manage costs and set up triggered actions for projects. You can also generate billing exports as well as reports to better understand your spending.
Finally, the Google cloud console is available as a free mobile app for both android and IOS. It can help you understand the health of your services at a glance with customizable graphs e.g. CPU, network usage, and show you any billing alerts. It will help you navigate through errors and alerts, you can also start and stop compute engine instances, navigate through their lo, and even ssh into them.
