Before we begin diving into the various ways of interacting with GCP, you'll need to either create or join a Google Cloud project. But first, what is a project? A project is the fundamental organizational component of Google Cloud, containing cloud resources, collaborators, permissions, and billing information. For cloud resources, projects help associate things such as networks, virtual machines, and databases, and segregate them in a logical manner. For users and permissions, projects makes it easy to define team roles and their associated rights.

Services and accounts in one project will be walled off from resources in other projects unless explicitly enabled. This provides a fundamental layer of security that can be built upon further via Google's Identity & Access Management (IAM) system and the principle of least...

The Google Cloud Platform offers a range of channels for managing and interacting with project resources and services, including the Google Cloud Console, command-line tools, mobile applications, IDE plugins, web APIs, and libraries for many popular programming languages. The Google Cloud Console is the primary interface for GCP, offering a one-stop shop for all of your cloud operations. Combined with the power of the Google Cloud Shell, there is very little you cannot do from the Cloud Console.

With a simple and straightforward UI, the Cloud Console also offers an approachable way to acquaint oneself with the various features and tools of Google Cloud as shown in the following screenshot:

The Google Cloud Console dashboard offers a high-level view of the state of your project, as well as important updates about GCP...

While the Google Cloud Console is an intuitive tool capable of many high-level management tasks, there are many cases that call for more powerful and expressive tools. For these cases, Google offers an innovative solution: the Google Cloud Shell. The Google Cloud Shell is a free, fully managed, interactive web-based shell with deep integrations into the Cloud Console and the rest of the Google Cloud Platform.

The Google Cloud Shell is one of many components built into the GCP ecosystem geared for developer and operational enablement. Other components include version control with source repositories, container builder, and deployment manager for build processes and continuous delivery applications, IDE integrations, and cloud service emulators for local development, to name a few. Taken as a whole, this suite of tools and services makes developing services...

While the Google Cloud Console is incredibly feature-rich, there are many applications that are better suited to different channels for interacting with GCP. On-the-go users may not always have access to their computer, and while the Cloud Shell with its Code Editor and Web Preview features make in-browser development a viable option, most developers will prefer to continue developing on their local machines. Google offers several tools to make these kinds of interactions with GCP easier.

For managing your GCP projects on the go, Google offers the Cloud Console Mobile App for iPhone and Android. This app offers a quick and easy way to do things like check system health, manage billing and teams, and...

To help drive customer success, Google offers tools and interfaces that aid teams in the end-to-end application management process, from developing and deploying applications to supporting them in production. With the Cloud Console, users have access to a powerful and easy-to-use interface for creating and managing cloud resources on the Google Cloud Platform. With the interactive Cloud Shell, functionality is amplified far beyond what a traditional UI could achieve. Google expands on these core features with tools such as the Cloud Shell Code Editor and Web Preview, making it possible to create, test, deploy, and monitor services—all without leaving the browser.

The Cloud Console is part of the larger set of products and services Google offers for creating and managing applications in the cloud. As mentioned, Google offers convenient IDE integrations for local...