The Google Cloud SDK

Although APIs are incredibly powerful and underpin every other GCP interface, they can be cumbersome when it comes to manually interacting with cloud resources. For normal day-to-day operations and basic task automation, Google offers a set of command-line tools as part of the Google Cloud SDK. In addition to command-line tools, the Google Cloud SDK also includes tools to aid in local application development, including a local App Engine development server and emulators for cloud services, such as Pub/Sub, Datastore, and Bigtable.

Installing the Google Cloud SDK

The Google Cloud SDK comes preinstalled in the Cloud Shell, but there are oftentimes when having the SDK installed locally will provide a better...