Getting started with Google Cloud Platform(GCP)

Getting started with Google Cloud Platform(GCP)

Google provides the same cloud services as other cloud providers such as Amazon Web Services(AWS) and Microsoft (Azure). It refers it as Google Cloud Platform or GCP. You can easily get started by signing up for free – https://cloud.google.com/free/

List of all products provided in GCP –  products

Google provides several ways to interact with its services-

1. GCP console (web ui)

GCP console is a web user interface which lets you interact with GCP resources. You can view, create, update and delete cloud resources from this page.

How to create a Linux vm(instance) using the console – quick start with Linux.

2. Command Line Interface (gcloud cli toolset)

Install gcloud : gcloud sdk

The gcloud toolkit is a command line interface tool to interact with GCP resources. Very useful in automating cloud tasks, with its command completion and help pages, it is crucial that you  familiarize yourself with this tool. It will come handy when the GUI won’t do the job and you have to quickly apply a change across multiple resources.

How to create an instance using gcloud cli – compute instances reference.

3. Cloud deployment manager

GCP deployment manager allows you to create, delete and update GCP resources in parallel by declaring a set of templates written in jinja2 or python. Templates can be shared with other teams and can be re-used with little modification.

What deployment manager is and how it works – deployment manager documentation

How to deploy an a GCP instance using deployment manager – quick start with deployment manager

4. APIs

Google provides application programming interface(APIs) to interact with its GCP services. Google recommends using the client libraries over directly calling the RESTful apis.

a. Client libraries

List of client libraries for different programming languages – client libraries

How to interact with Google Compute Engine(GCE) using the Python client library – create an instance

b. RESTful or raw APIs

API Reference – compute docs reference.

Method for creating an instance – instance compute instance method.

References –
Google Cloud Platform Services overview

GCP blog

Google open source blog