gcloud

gcloud is the command-line interface for Google Cloud Platform (GCP). It is part of the Google Cloud SDK and provides a unified toolset for managing GCP resources and services from a terminal or script.

The gcloud CLI is cross-platform, available for Windows, macOS, and Linux, and is distributed as part of the Google Cloud SDK. It typically runs as a Python-based executable and can be installed via the Cloud SDK installer or platform-specific package managers. After installation, users authenticate with gcloud auth login or a service account using gcloud auth activate-service-account, and then select a project with gcloud config set project.

Users often start with gcloud init, which guides initial authentication, project selection, and configuration. Configuration data can be organized into multiple named configurations with gcloud config configurations create, and you can switch between them. Common configuration properties include project, compute/region, and compute/zone.

Commands follow the general pattern gcloud <service> <resource> <action>. Examples include gcloud compute instances create, gcloud container clusters get-credentials, and gcloud run deploy. The CLI covers most GCP services such as Compute Engine, Kubernetes Engine, Cloud Storage, BigQuery, Pub/Sub, Cloud Functions, Cloud Run, and Cloud SQL.

For automation, gcloud supports --format and JSON output for pipelines and can use Application Default Credentials for non-interactive contexts. The Cloud SDK also includes gsutil and bq, and can be used alongside the Google Cloud Console.