In this blog post, I will show you how to use Google Cloud Platform, Cloud Shell to manage resources and services in GCP.
About Cloud Shell
GCP Cloud Shell is a browser-based management shell that is hosted inside Google’s datacentre and allows us to manage resources in GCP.
Cloud Shell is loaded with many developments, tools, SDKs and Cloud SDK.
Pricing
Cloud Shell is 100% free and costs nothing to run and use the underlining persistence storage.
The reason Cloud Shell is free is that it allows GCP customers to deploy and manage resource using a secure and optimized Shell environment.
Start Cloud Shell
Cloud Shell is available from the GCP management console, top navigation menu as shown below.
To start it click on it and wait for it to start.
In the background, GCP will provision a VM instance that will run the Shell and persistence storage to save your image and command history.
By default, Cloud Shell comes with 5GB persistent disk storage.
The good thing about Cloud Shell that it automatically authenticates your user name with GCP.
gcloud config set project ntweekly
cloud compute instances list
Code Editor
Cloud Shell also comes with a code editor which allows us to create, edit and upload scripts and run them.
You can also use Git to pull and push code repositories from Cloud Shell.
To start the editor, click on the pan icon on the top right corner of the shell.
From the editor, write or copy your code and save it.
To run the code, which in my case is a python app, I will simply run it with python which comes loaded.
