Google Cloud Platform(GCP) : Part- 3

Interacting with GCP

There are four ways we can interact with Google Cloud Platform.

• Console: The GCP Console is a web-based administrative interface. It lets us view and manage all the projects and all the resources they use. It also lets us enable, disable and explore the APIs of GCP services. And it gives us access to Cloud Shell. The GCP Console also includes a tool called the APIs Explorer that helps to learn about the APIs interactively. It let's us see what APIs are available and in what versions. These APIs expect parameters and documentation on them is built in.
• SDK and Cloud Shell: Cloud Shell is a command-line interface to GCP that's easily accessed from the browser. From Cloud Shell, we can use the tools provided by the Google Cloud Software Development kit SDK without having to first install them somewhere. The Google Cloud SDK is a set of tools that we can use to manage our resources and applications on GCP. These include the gcloud tool which provides the main command line interface for Google Cloud Platform products and services. There's also gsutil which is for Google Cloud Storage and bq which is for BigQuery. The easiest way to get to the SDK commands is to click the Cloud Shell button on a GCP Console. We can also install the SDK on our own computers, our on-premise servers of virtual machines and other clouds. The SDK is also available as a docker image.
• Mobile App
• APIs: The services that make up GCP offer Restful application programming interfaces so that the code we write can control them. The GCP Console lets us turn on and off APIs. Many APIs are off by default, and many are associated with quotas and limits. These restrictions help protect us from using resources inadvertently. We can enable only those APIs we need and we can request increases in quotas when we need more resources.

Cloud Launcher

Google Cloud Launcher is a tool for quickly deploying functional software packages on Google Cloud platform. GCP updates the base images for the software packages to fix critical issues and vulnerabilities, but it doesn't update the software after it's been deployed.

Virtual Private Cloud(VPC)

Virtual machines  have the power in generality of a full-fledged operating system in each system. We can segment our networks, use firewall rules to restrict access to instances, and create static routes to forward traffic to specific destinations. Virtual Private Cloud networks that we define have global scope. We can dynamically increase the size of a subnet in a custom network by expanding the range of IP addresses allocated to it. 
Features of VPCs are:

• VPCs have routing tables. These areused to forward traffic from one instance to another instance within the same network. Even across sub-networks and even between GCP zones without requiring an external IP address.
• VPCs give us a global distributed firewall. We can control to restrict access to instances both incoming and outgoing traffic.
• Cloud Load Balancing is a fully distributed software defined managed service for all our traffic. With Cloud Load Balancing, a single anycast IP front ends all our backend instances in regions around the world. It provides cross region load balancing, including automatic multi region failover, which gently moves traffic in fractions if backends become unhealthy. Cloud Load Balancing reacts quickly to changes in users, traffic, backend health, network conditions, and other related conditions.
• Cloud DNS is a managed DNS service running on the same infrastructure as Google. It has low latency and high availability and it's a cost effective way to make our applications and services available to our users. The DNS information we publish is served from redundant locations around the world. Cloud DNS is also programmable. We can publish and manage millions of DNS zones and records using the GCP console, the command line interface or the API. Google has a global system of edgecaches. We can use this system to accelerate content delivery in your application using Google Cloud CDN.
• Cloud router lets our other networks and our Google VPC exchange route information over the VPN using the Border Gateway Protocol.
• Peering means putting a router in the same public data center as a Google point of presence and exchanging traffic. One downside of peering though is that it isn't covered by a Google service level agreement. Customers who want the highest uptimes for their interconnection with Google should use dedicated interconnect in which customers get one more direct private connections to Google. If these connections have topologies that meet Google's specifications, they can be covered by up to a 99.99 percent SLA.

Compute Engine

Computer engine lets us create and run virtual machines on Google infrastructure. We can create a virtual machine instance by using the Google cloud platform console or the gcloud command line tool. Once our VMs are running, it's easy to take a durable snapshot of their discs. We can keep these as backups or use them when we need to migrate a VM to another region. A preemptible VM is different from an ordinary compute engine VM in only one respect. We've given compute engine permission to terminate it if its resources are needed elsewhere. We can save a lot of money with preemptible VMs. Compute engine has a feature called auto scaling that lets us add and take away VMs from our application based on load metrics.

Don't limit your challenges. Challenge your limits..