Interacting with Google Cloud
1. Interacting with Google Cloud
Now that you had a chance to explore how resources in Google Cloud run, are organized, and billed to you, it's time to see how you actually interact with Google Cloud to start your work. You can use four Google products to access and interact with Google Cloud. The Google Cloud console, the Google Cloud SDK and Cloud Shell, the APIs, and the Google Cloud app. Let's explore each. The first is the Google Cloud Console, which is Google Cloud's graphical user interface, or GUI, and it helps you deploy, scale, and diagnose production issues in a simple web-based interface. With the Google Cloud console, you can easily find your resources, check their health, have full management control over them, and set budgets to control how much you spend on them. The Google Cloud console also provides a search facility to quickly find resources and connect to instances through SSH in the browser. The Google Cloud console is available from console.cloud.google.com. You'll get some experience with the Cloud console during an upcoming lab. The second products are the Google Cloud SDK and Cloud Shell. Unlike the Google Cloud console, you can download and install the Google Cloud SDK locally onto a computer. The Google Cloud SDK is a set of tools you can use to manage resources and applications hosted on Google Cloud. These include the gcloud tool, which provides the main command-line interface for Google Cloud products and services, gcloud storage, which lets you access Cloud Storage from the command line, and bq, a command-line tool for BigQuery. When installed, all of the tools within the Google Cloud SDK are located under the bin directory. Cloud Shell provides command-line access to cloud resources directly from a browser. Cloud Shell is a Debian-based virtual machine with a persistent 5 gigabyte home directory, which makes it easy to manage Google Cloud projects and resources. Each Cloud Shell VM is ephemeral, which means that it will be stopped whenever you stop using it interactively, and it'll be restarted when you re-enter Cloud Shell. It also provides web preview functionality and built-in authorization for access to Cloud console projects and resources, including your GKE resources. With Cloud Shell, the Google Cloud SDK gcloud command and other utilities are always installed, available, up to date, and fully authenticated. The Cloud console's GKE area has a web-based interface for administering GKE resources. The Cloud Shell is the place to launch commands to administer those GKE resources. Some of those commands are from the Google Cloud SDK, and others will be specific to your workload. Later in this course, you'll learn about the kubectl command, and you can see it being launched from Cloud Shell here. The third way to access Google Cloud is through application programming interfaces, or APIs. The services that make up Google Cloud offer APIs so that code you write can control them. The Cloud Console includes a tool called the Google APIs Explorer that shows which APIs are available, and in which versions. You can try these APIs interactively, even those that require user authentication. One important point to note is that developers often use APIs to build applications that allocate and manage Google Cloud resources. However, our present focus is on letting Kubernetes manage resources for us. And finally, the fourth way to access and interact with Google Cloud is with the Google Cloud app, which can be used to start, stop, and use SSH to connect to Compute Engine instances and see logs from each instance. It also lets you stop and start Cloud SQL instances. Additionally, you can administer applications deployed on App Engine by viewing errors, rolling back deployments, and changing traffic splitting. The Google Cloud app isn't relevant for the purposes of this course.2. Let's practice!
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