Summary

In this chapter, we started by providing a high-level overview of the cloud itself, likening it to a power company, and illustrating some of its key advantages: on-demand, broad network access, resource pooling, elasticity, pay for what you use, and economy of scale. From there, we moved on to examine the four ways of interacting with Google Cloud: through the Google Cloud Console (web UI), the command line (SDK and Cloud Shell), the APIs with code or automation software such as Terraform, and via the mobile app. Lastly, we did a quick pass over several different Google Cloud services in the two key areas: compute and data.

From here, there are a lot of directions we could go, but this is a book about laying a Google Cloud foundation, so we need to keep focused on that. Well, if you want to lay a good foundation, then you should probably start with the next chapter.