Google Cloud – Getting started

Cloud Platforms, ,

I have used AWS for most of my Cloud related needs. Recently, I tried out Google Cloud and I will share some of my experiences with Google Cloud in this blog.

The easiest way to get started is to signup for the 60 day trial. This gives 300$ of credit to use Google Cloud for 60 days. It is necessary to register using a credit card.

Google cloud services can be accessed either using Developer’s console, CLI, SDK. It is needed to create atleast a single project to get started. First, I created a project using the Developer’s console. Developer’s console can be accessed from here.

Installing and using gcloud SDK:

Use the procedure here to install SDK.
Following are the steps that I did to install SDK in Ubuntu 14.04 VM running in Virtualbox:

# Install SDK
curl https://sdk.cloud.google.com | bash

# Authenticate, this will open browser window to authenticate
gcloud auth login

# Set the project and Zone
# Find the project id by listing the projects
gcloud config set project 
gcloud config set compute/zone 

# List config variables
$ gcloud config  list
[compute]
zone = us-central1-b
[core]
account = <email>
disable_usage_reporting = False
project = eighth-keyword-474

Lets create and manage a Compute VM.

# Create a compute VM with f1-micro size and Ubuntu 14.04 image
$ gcloud compute instances create example-instance --image ubuntu-14-04 --machine-type f1-micro

# List instances running
$ gcloud compute instances list
NAME             ZONE          MACHINE_TYPE INTERNAL_IP    EXTERNAL_IP    STATUS
example-instance us-central1-b f1-micro     10.240.75.165  104.154.42.88  RUNNING

# To ssh to instance(When we run this the first time, it will ask us to mention the secret key and also push the key to allow ssh access)
$ gcloud compute ssh example-instance

# To list firewall rules 
$ gcloud compute firewall-rules list

# Delete instance created
$ gcloud compute instances delete example-instance

I found Google Cloud to be very easy to use and has lot of similarities to AWS, I found the CLI to be more intuitive and GUI to be more dynamic. Considering that AWS has a head-start, AWS has more features compared to Google Cloud.

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