Working with Google Cloud SDK and Cloud Shell

You have access to the GCP Console now, and you can pretty much do anything using the Console. But a better approach for a developer is to use Cloud SDK, which is a collection of tools that allow faster local development by using emulators or tools like kubectl, Skaffold, and minikube. Not only that, but you can manage your resources, authenticate with remote Kubernetes clusters, and enable or disable GCP services from your local workstation. Another option is to use Cloud Shell from your browser, and we will be exploring both options in this chapter. Cloud SDK gives you tools and a library for interacting with its product and services. You can install and remove components as per your needs when using Cloud SDK.

Let's start with Cloud SDK. You can navigate to https://cloud.google.com/sdk/ and click on the Get Started button. This will redirect you to the installation guide. A minimum prerequisite for Cloud SDK is to have Python...