There are four ways you can interact with Google Cloud Platform, each of them are listed below :
- GCP Console
- SDK and Cloud Shell
- Mobile App
- APIs.
1. GCP Console
- The GCP Console is a web-based administrative interface. If you build an application in GCP, you will interact with it and not exposed to the end users of your app.
- It lets you view and manage all your projects and all the resources they use.
- It also lets you enable, disable and explore the APIs of GCP services.
- It gives you access to Cloud Shell.
2. A. Cloud Shell
That’s a command-line interface to GCP that’s easily accessed from your browser.
From Cloud Shell, you can use the tools provided by the Google Cloud Software Development kit SDK, without having to first install them somewhere.
2. B. Google Cloud SDK – Software Development Kit
The Google Cloud SDK is a set of tools that you can use to manage your resources and your applications on GCP.
These include the gcloud tool, which provides the main command line interface for Google Cloud Platform products and services.
GSUTIL
gsutil is a Python application that lets you access Cloud Storage from the command line. You can use gsutil to do a wide range of bucket and object management tasks, including:
- Creating and deleting buckets.
- Uploading, downloading, and deleting objects.
- Listing buckets and objects.
- Moving, copying, and renaming objects.
- Editing object and bucket ACLs.
BQ
bq is a python-based, command-line tool for BigQuery.
A virtual machine with all these commands is already installed. You can also install the SDK on your own computers – your laptop, your on-premise servers of virtual machines and other clouds. The SDK is also available as a docker image, which is a really easy and clean way to work with it.
3. API’s
The services that make up GCP offer application programming interfaces so that the code you write can control them. These APIs are what’s called RESTful. In other words they follow the representational state transfer paradigm.
Basically, it means that your code can use Google services in much the same way that web browsers talk to web servers.
The APIs name resources and GCP with URLs. Your code can pass information to the APIs using JSON, which is a very popular way of passing textual information over the web.
And there’s an open system for user log in and access control. The GCP Console lets you turn on and off APIs.
Many APIs are off by default, and many are associated with quotas and limits. These restrictions help protect you from using resources inadvertently.
You can enable only those APIs you need and you can request increases in quotas when you need more resources.
The GCP Console includes a tool called the APIs Explorer that helps you learn about the APIs interactively. It lets you see what APIs are available and in what versions.
These APIs expect parameters and documentation on them is built in. You can try the APIs interactively even with user authentication. Suppose you have explored an API and you’re ready to build an application that uses it. Google provides client libraries that take a lot of the drudgery out of the task of calling GCP from your code.
Libraries
There are two kinds of libraries.
- Cloud Client Library
- Google API Client Library
The Cloud Client Libraries are Google clouds latest and recommended libraries for its APIs. They adopt the native styles and idioms of each language. Google Cloud Client Libraries are our latest and recommended client libraries for calling Google Cloud APIs. They provide an optimized developer experience by using each supported language’s natural conventions and styles. They also reduce the boilerplate code you have to write because they’re designed to enable you to work with service metaphors in mind, rather than implementation details or service API concepts.
On the other hand, sometimes a Cloud Client Library doesn’t support the newest services and features. In that case, you can use the Google API Client Library for your desired languages. These libraries are designed for generality and completeness.
Following are the Cloud Client Libraries available,
- Java
- Node.js
- Python
- C#
- Go
- Ruby
- PHP
Mobile App
There’s a mobile App for Android and iOS that lets you examine and manage the resources you’re using in GCP.
It lets you build dashboards so that you can get the information you need at a glance.