GCP : Ways to interact with GCP services

There are basically three different ways to interact with GCP.

1. Google Cloud platform Console

One create a new project, or choose an existing project, and use the resources that you create in the context of that project. You can create multiple projects, so you can use projects to separate your work in whatever way makes sense for you. For example, you might start a new project if you want to make sure only certain team members can access the resources in that project, while all team members can continue to access resources in another project.

2. Command line interface
The Google Cloud SDK provided gcloud tool which gives the commands we need. This tool can be used for managing the development workflow and GCP resources.
GCP also provides cloudshell a browser based interactive shell environment for GCP. The cloud shell can be used from GCP console.

The cloud shell provides basically the below

1. A temporary compute engine
2. Command line access to the instance from a web browser
3. A built in code editor
4. Persistant disk storage upto 5 GB
5. Pre-installed Google SDK and and other tools
6. Language support for Java and, Go, Python, Node.js, PHP, Ruby, and .NET
7. Web Preview functionality
8. Built in authorization to access resources

3. Client libraries

Client libraries are part of Google cloud SDK and it enable one to easily create and manage resources. GCP client libraries expose APIs for two main purposes:

 a. App APIs provide access to services. App APIs are optimized for supported languages, such as Node.js and Python. The libraries are designed around service metaphors, so one can work with the services more naturally and write less boilerplate code. The libraries also provide helpers for authentication and authorization.

 b. Admin APIs offer functionality for resource management. For example, you can use admin APIs if you want to build your own automated tools.

One also can use the Google API client libraries to access APIs for products such as Google Maps, Google Drive, and YouTube.

References:
https://cloud.google.com/docs/overview/