The main management tool in the GCP suite is Google Cloud Shell. This is a free g1-small Google Compute Engine (GCE) instance that provides command-line access so that you can manage your GCP infrastructure through a Linux shell. The interesting thing here is that it can be accessed directly from your GCP console simply by clicking on the shell access in the top-right-hand side:
Once activated, the console screen will split in two and Google Cloud Shell will become visible inside the browser:
No additional steps are required for authorization, so we can manage projects and resources securely without the need to install any other management toolset. Moreover, the SDK command lines that we will look at in this chapter are packaged as standard. Additionally, Google Cloud Shell has preinstalled admin tools such as MySQL client, Docker, and kubectl. Finally, your...