GCP Console:
Using this web based console, you can manage your GCP projects and resources.
Serves as a centralized console for all project data
Execute common tasks using simple mouse clicks.
The resources you create are done in the context of a specific project: Manage and create projects
Access developer tools:
Cloud Source Repositories - Git repos for collaborative development
Cloud SDK - a set of tools to automate your workflow
Cloud Shell - Shell within the GCP Console
Every GCP service you use is associated with a project:
Enable services and APIs
Enable billing
Adding and removing collaborators: Manage permissions and credentials
Track resources and quota usage.
Using resource manager, manage your projects programmatically in GCP - Rest API.
Under one account, you can have one or multiple projects. And, each resource belongs to exactly one project.
Projects can have different owners and users they are billed separately and managed separately.
Projects have three identifying attributes:
Project ID
Globally unique
Assigned by GCP but editable during creation only
Project Name
Need not be unique
Chosen by you
Mutable/Editable
You can't reuse the project name of a deleted project.
Project Number
Globally unique
Assigned by GCP
Immutable
Billing in GCP is set up at the project level. When you define a GCP project, you link a billing account to it where you set up a payment option.
A billing account is linked to zero or more projects.
Projects that you don't link to any billing account can only use free GCP services.
Accounts are charged automatically, invoiced monthly, or invoiced at the threshold limit.
You can separate project billings by setting up billing sub accounts. Some GCP customers that re-sell GCP services use sub accounts for each of their own clients.
Budgets and alerts
You can define budget at the billing account level or the project level.
To be notified when budget approach the limit, you can use an alert.
You can also set up a web hook that can control automation based on billing alerts, for example, you can set up a script to shutdown resources when a billing alert occurs.
Billing export
Billing exports allow you to store detailed billing information for external analysis.
Reports
visual tool in the console to monitor expenditure
Quotas
Helpful limits to prevent over-consumsuption of resources because of an error or a malicious attack.
They apply at the level of GCP project.
Two types of quotas:
Rate quotas reset after a specific time. For example, GKE API: 1,000 requests per 100 seconds
Allocation quotas governs number of allocation resources have in your projects. For example, 5 networks per project
Many quotas are changeable by calling the Google support. You can also use the console to request a quota change.
Cloud SDK allows you to manage GCP resources and applications from a desktop.
gcloud
Manages authentication, local configuration, developer workflow, and interaction with the cloud platform APIs.
gsutil
Provides command-line access to the storage buckets and objects
bq
Allows you to run query and manipulate datasets, tables in Bigtable
kubectl
For managing Kubernates.
Start Google Cloud SDK Shell
Run gcloud init
Broswer-based CLI access to resources
No need to install Cloud SDK or other tools locally
Runs on an ephemeral Compute Engine VM at no cost to you
5 GB of persistant disk storage
Wen preview functionality and built-in authorization for project/resources access.