Getting started with Gcloud

Command line interface to interact with Google Cloud Resources.
Most GCP services can be managed from CLI using GCloud.
- Compute Engine Virtual Machines
- Managed Instance Groups
- Databases
- and .... many more
We can create/delete/update/read existing resources and perform actions like deployments as well.
(REMEMBER) Some GCP services have specific CLI tools:
- Cloud Storage- gsutil
- Cloud BigQuery- bq
- Cloud BigTable- cbt
- Kubernetes- kubectl(in addition to GCloud which is used to manage clusters)

Installation

GCloud is a part of Google Cloud SDK.
- Cloud SDK requires python
- Instructions to install Cloud SDK(and GCloud): cloud.google.com/sdk/docs/install
We can also use Gcloud on Cloud Shell

gcloud --version

Initialize Gcloud
- Initialize or reinitialize gcloud
- Authorize gcloud to use your user account credentials
- Setup configuration

gcloud init

gcloud config list

gcloud GROUP SUBGROUP ACTION ...

GROUP:
- config or compute or container or dataflow or functions or iam or....
  - which service group are you playing with.
SUBGROUP:
- Instances or images or instance templates or machine-types or regions or zones.
  - Which subgroup of the service do you want to play with?
ACTION:
- Create or list or start or stop or describe or...
  - What do you want to do?

Create a new instance

  gcloud compute instances create my-first-instance

Describe a specific instance[all details around a compute instance]
```
  gcloud compute instances describe my-first-instance
```
Delete a instance
```
  gcloud compute instances delete my-first-instance
```
Other examples
```
  gcloud compute regions list
  gcloud compute zones list
  gcloud compute machine-types list
  gcloud compute machine-types list --filter="zone:us-central1-b"
```
Important things to remember
- Cloud Shell is backed by a VM instance(automatically provisioned by Google Cloud when you launch Cloud Shell)
  - 5 GB of free persistent disk storage is provided as your $HOME directory
  - Prepackaged with the latest version of Cloud SDK, docker, etc.
  - (Remember) Files in your home directory persist between sessions(scripts, user configuration files like .bashrc and .vimrc, etc)
  - The instance is terminated if you are inactive for more than 20 minutes.
    - Any modifications that you made to it outside your $HOME will be lost.
  - (REMEMBER) After 120 days of inactivity, even your $HOME directory is deleted.
- Cloud Shell can be used to SSH into virtual machines using their private IP addresses.