Watch this Google Cloud Console tutorial
The first place most users interact with Google Cloud Platform is through their console. The Google Cloud Console is a web-based interface that enables administrators to manage resources, track issues, break down costs and more.
In this Google Cloud Console tutorial, we'll run through the basics of Google Cloud Platform (GCP), how to access resources and how to customize it to meet specific needs.
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The console is tailored to a specific project, so any changes made are attached to that project and not replicated to any others. It's worth noting that project ID, current billing costs and API request usage are all displayed on the dashboard.
Users can add additional dashboards or modify existing ones by going to the Customize button on the top right side of the screen. Some of the dashboards that are present but hidden by default include Google Cloud SQL, App Engine and Compute Engine, which can be expanded to report any Stackdriver metrics. If you want to view a history of the changes made to a specific project, a full audit trail is available under the Activity tab.
Access to all GCP resources is located in the navigation menu in the top left corner of the window. From here, users can browse resources and corresponding tabs to create or manage resources. Depending on how frequently a project admin needs to access a resource, these pages can be pinned to the side of the navigation menu for easy access.
Another feature on the Google Cloud Console highlighted in this tutorial is Cloud Shell. This is an in-browser terminal that has the Google Cloud SDK pre-installed and enables users to manage infrastructure and apps via the command line. When you launch Cloud Shell, GCP opens a lightweight container with a shell, then destroys it at the end of your session. There's no charge for using Cloud Console or Cloud Shell.
Hello and welcome to Google Cloud Platform Console 101. This is going to go over just a few of the basics from the GCP Console and how to use it best.
So, to start off, there a few basics I want to cover right away. First, is in the top panel right next to Google Cloud Platform, you'll see "TechSnipsDemo" -- that is the project name. Every resource in Google Cloud has a project associated with it and that's how you'll see billing or IM permissions assigned.
There are a few other panels here on the dashboard that I want to cover. Namely, Project info which is in the top left corner, you'll see a few details about that project. You'll also see API requests per second and some other stats, including billing. If we scroll down a little bit, you'll see additional documentation, getting started and news about Google Cloud.
Going back up to the top here, if we click on Customize in the top right corner, you'll see there's a few other things that we aren't seeing that we could change. So, if we were using compute instances, for example, we could turn on Compute Engine. And, if we didn't want to have the Getting Started panel here, let's turn that off and then click Done. And you'll see that those two have now changed on our dashboard here.
If we move over to Activity, you'll see these are all the actions I've taken on this project. So, this is a good audit trail if anything happens and you need to know what resources have changed. Let's go back to dashboard. And up here in the top left corner, we have our navigation menu and these are all of the resources that are available to you in GCP. If we scroll down here we'll see things like Compute, Kubernetes, SQL, IM, Stackdriver, so on and so forth.
But if there's some that you know you're going to be using more than others, you could click on the pin here and it will appear just at the top of the list. That way, if we wanted to minimize our products window here, we just have the ones we're interested in. And if they have continuation arrows on the right side, you'll see that there's other things we can do with them here. So, for example, under Compute Engine, I have VM instances, and discs, snapshots etc. and we can click on one of those. And you see we don't have anything running right now, but we have the ability to create or import some.
And the last thing I want to point out is the Activate Cloud Shell here. Cloud Shell is really a nifty feature, by clicking that it will provision a container for you with a shell with the Google Cloud SDK already installed. So if I wanted to type gcloud -- help we'll see some information on the gcloud command line here.
All right. That's it for today. Thanks for watching.