Google Cloud Platform (GCP) Reference

Kip Landergren

(Updated: )

My cheat sheet for Google Cloud Platform covering terminology, common commands, and links to the most helpful documentation resources.

Contents

Tooling
gcloud CLI tool for managing Google Cloud Platform resources
gsutil CLI tool for managing Cloud Storage

Commands

help

gcloud --help

info

gcloud info

config

View, set and unset properties used by the Google Cloud SDK. Reduces the amount of flags needing to be passe don other commands.

gcloud config --help

gcloud config list

gcloud config set project example-com

gcloud config set compute/region us-west2

gcloud config unset compute/region

iam

gcloud iam --help

gcloud iam roles --help

gcloud iam service-accounts --help

dns

gcloud dns --help

addresses

gcloud compute addresses --help

gcloud compute addresses list

gcloud compute addresses create example-com-static-ip

gcloud compute addresses create example-com-global-static-ip --global

gcloud compute addresses create example-com-regional-static-ip --region=us-west2

gcloud compute addresses delete example-com-static-ip

forwarding-rules

gcloud compute forwarding-rules --help

gcloud compute forwarding-rules list

gcloud compute forwarding-rules describe NAME

gcloud compute forwarding-rules delete NAME

Docker Integration

Register gcloud as credential helper:

gcloud auth configure-docker

Tag local image:

docker tag LOCAL-IMAGE-NAME gcr.io/PROJECT-NAME/IMAGE-NAME:TAG

Push to GCR:

docker push gcr.io/PROJECT-NAME/IMAGE-NAME:TAG

Pull from GCR:

docker pull gcr.io/PROJECT-NAME/IMAGE-NAME:TAG

Pulling Image to GKE from GCR

For a newly created cluster, things should “just work” as the service account should be provisioned with permissions that allow read-only access to dev storage. If not, review the service account permissions and access policy on the bucket storing the images.

Quick steps:

Creating a Cluster

Notes below are based on creating a cluster through the Cloud Console.

Kubernetes Versions: Standard and Advanced

“Advanced” has an improved SLA and reliability. More info in this blog post.

Regional vs Zonal

From the official documentation:

“A regional cluster provides a single static endpoint for the entire cluster and spreads your cluster's Pods across multiple zones of a given region. This allows you to access the cluster's control plane even during an outage or downtime involving one or more (but not all) individual zones.”

As of August 2019 you cannot switch a Zonal cluster to Regional. If you choose Zonal, the zone is permanent.

Master Version

Choose the Kubernetes version appropriate to your application and any dependencies it may have.

Node Pools

Select “More Options” to better customize.

Network Configuration

HTTP Load Balancing

If disabled, default Ingress objects will not be created using Google Cloud Load Balancer. However, a network load balancer will still be provisioned via a forwarding-rule for any IP address to target-pool mapping. This will incur an hourly charge.

Connecting to Cluster

Copy the command from the Cloud Console button “Connect” to update your local kubeconfig file with appropriate credentials and endpoint information.

Generally of form:

gcloud container clusters get-credentials CLUSTER-NAME

Google Cloud Platform (GCP) Terminology

address
an IP address, may be ephemeral or reserved
bucket
a container for your objects; cannot be nested within another
forwarding-rule
directs traffic matching an address to a forwarding target, like a target-pool
object
the piece of data stored
region
a specific geographic location where your resources run
target-pool
load-balanced pool of virtual machine instances
zone
an isolated location within a region; name take form <region>-<zone>

External Links

Reference

Tooling