Other command-line tools

Although the majority of tasks on Google Cloud Platform can be completed via gcloud, there are some activities that require additional tools. This is primarily due to the development history and scope of the tools and their related platforms.

In addition to gcloud, the Google Cloud SDK comes bundled with gsutil and bq. Additionally, the Google Cloud SDK offers a few other product-specific command-line tools that are not installed by default, but can be installed via gcloud components install. Here, we'll just touch on some of the major tools used in this book.

bq

The bq command-line tool is used to interact with BigQuery. It includes basic commands for tasks like retrieving metadata about projects and tables, checking the status of running jobs, and executing queries. The bq command is covered in more detail in Chapter 15, Integrating with Big Data Solutions on GCP.

gsutil

For managing buckets and files on Google Cloud Storage, Google offers the  open-source gsutil command...