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Gcloud for Associate Cloud Engineer

By on Feb 16, 2025

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Gcloud

Command line interface to interact with Google Cloud Resources

Most GCP services can be managed from CLI using Gcloud:

  • Compute Engine Virtual Machines
  • Managed Instance Group
  • Databases
  • and… mant more

You can create/delete/update/read existing resources and perform actions life deployment as well!

(REMEMBER) SOME GCP services have specific CLI tools

  • Cloud Storage – gsutil
  • Cloud BigQuery – bq
  • Cloud Bigtable – cbt
  • Kubernetes – kubectl(in addition to Gcloud which is used to manage clusters)

Gloud – Getting Started

Installation

  • You can also use Gcloud on Cloud Shell

Connecting to GCP

  • gcloud init – initialize or reinitialize gcloud
    • Authorize gcloud to use your user account credentials
    • Setup configuration
      • includes current project, default zone etc.
  • gcloud config list – list all properties of the active configuration 
gcloud config list project
gcloud config configurations list
gcloud config configurations activate my-default-configuration
gcloud config list
gcloud config configurations describe my-second-configuration
gcloud compute instances list
gcloud compute instances create
gcloud compute instances create my-first-instance-from-gcloud
gcloud compute instances describe my-first-instance-from-gcloud
gcloud compute instances delete my-first-instance-from-gcloud
gcloud compute zones list
gcloud compute regions list
gcloud compute machine-types list
 
gcloud compute machine-types list --filter zone:asia-southeast2-b
gcloud compute machine-types list --filter "zone:(asia-southeast2-b asia-southeast2-c)"
gcloud compute zones list --filter=region:us-west2
gcloud compute zones list --sort-by=region
gcloud compute zones list --sort-by=~region
gcloud compute zones list --uri
gcloud compute regions describe us-west4
 
gcloud compute instance-templates list
gcloud compute instance-templates create instance-template-from-command-line
gcloud compute instance-templates delete instance-template-from-command-line
gcloud compute instance-templates describe my-instance-template-with-custom-image

gcloud config set

  • Sets the specified property in your active configuration
    • gcloud config set core/project VALUE
    • gcloud config set compute/region VALUE
    • gcloud config set compute/zone VALUE
    • gcloud config set core/verbosity VALUE(debug)
  • Syntax – gcloud config set SECTION/PROPERTY VALUE
    • core, compute – SECTIONS
    • project, region, zone – PROPERTIES
    • Specifying core is optional as it i s the default SECTION!
      • gloud config set project VALUE
      • gloud config set verbosity VALUE (debug)
    • Get more details with gcloud config set –help
      • Look for AVAILABLE PROPERTIES in the content
  • Opposite – gloud config unset

Gcloud – managing multiple configurations

  • Scenario: You are working on multiple projects from the same machine. You would want to be able to execute commands using different configurations.
    • How do you simplify this?
      • Gcloud config configurations create/delete/describe/active/list
        • create new configuration: gcloud config configuartions create NAME (dev)
        • Activate specific configuration: gcloud config configurations active NAME (dev)
        • list Configurations: gcloud config configurations list

gcloud command structure – Playing with Services

  • gcloud GROUP SUBGROUP ACTION
    • GROUP – config or compute or container or dataflow or functions or i am or ..
      • Which service group are you playing with?
    • SUBGROUP – instances or images or instance-templates or machine-types or regions or zones
      • Which sub group of the service do you want to play with?
    • ACTION – create or list or start to stop or describe or …
      • What do you want to do?
  • Example:
    • gcloud compute instances list
    • gcloud compute zones list
    • gcloud compute regions list
    • gcloud compute machine-types list
    • gcloud compute machine-types list –filter-“zone:us-centeral-b”
    • gcloud compute machine-types list –filter=”zone:(us-central1-b europe-west1-d)”

gcloud compute instances create

Compute Instances – Default Region and Zone

Three Options:

  • Option 1: (Centralize Configuration): gcloud compute project-info add metadata
    • `–metadata-[google-compute-default-region=REGION | google-compute-default-zone=ZONE
  • Option 2: (Local gcloud configuration): gcloud config set compute/region REGION
  • Option 3: (Command Specific): –zone in the command

Priority: Option 3 overrides Option 2 overrides option 1

List and Describe commands

  • Typically list commands are used to list a set of resources
    • gcloud compute RESOURCES list
      • gcloud compute images/regions/zones/ disk-types list
      • gcloud compute instances/disk/snapshots list
    • Most list commands support a few common options
      • `–filter=”zone:VALUE”
      • `–sort-by (NAME, ~NAME)
      • –uri
      • gcloud compute images list –sort-by NAME –filter “PROJECT: (window-cloud ubuntu-os-cloud)”
  • Typically describe commands are used to describe a specific resource
    • gcloud compute images describe ubuntu-1604-xenial-v202210203 –project ubuntu-os-cloud
    • gcloud compute regions describe-us-central1

Playing with Compute Instances – gcloud

Playing with compute instances

  • gcloud compute instances list/start/stop/delete/reset/describe

Playing with Instance Templates

  • gcloud compute instance-templates list

How to create a VM from instances

  • gcloud compute instances create my-test-vm --source-instance-template="instance-name