Cloud Console & Cloud Shell

Google Cloud provides two primary web-based tools for managing your cloud resources: the Cloud Console (a graphical web interface) and Cloud Shell (an integrated command-line environment). Together, they offer a complete management experience accessible from any web browser — no software installation required.

---

Google Cloud Console

The Cloud Console is GCP's web-based graphical user interface, accessible at console.cloud.google.com. It is the primary tool most users interact with when learning and managing GCP.

Key Features

Feature	Description
Dashboard	An overview of project resources, billing, and activity
Navigation menu	A hamburger menu on the left providing access to all GCP services
Project selector	A dropdown at the top for switching between projects
Search bar	Search for services, resources, documentation, and settings
Notifications	Alerts for deployments, errors, and billing events
Activity feed	A log of recent actions taken in the project
Cloud Shell button	One-click access to the integrated command-line environment

Navigating the Console

The Cloud Console organises GCP services into categories in the left-hand navigation menu:

• Compute — Compute Engine, App Engine, Cloud Functions, Cloud Run, GKE
• Storage — Cloud Storage, Filestore, Persistent Disk
• Networking — VPC, Load Balancing, Cloud DNS, Cloud CDN
• Databases — Cloud SQL, Spanner, Firestore, Bigtable
• Big Data — BigQuery, Dataflow, Dataproc, Pub/Sub
• AI & ML — Vertex AI, AutoML, Vision AI
• Operations — Monitoring, Logging, Error Reporting, Trace
• Security — IAM, Security Command Center, Key Management
• IAM & Admin — IAM, Service Accounts, Organisation Policies, Quotas

You can pin frequently used services to the top of the navigation menu for quick access.

Creating Resources via the Console

To create a resource (e.g., a Compute Engine VM):

1. Navigate to the service (e.g., Compute Engine > VM Instances)
2. Click Create Instance
3. Configure the settings (name, region, zone, machine type, boot disk, networking)
4. Review the configuration summary
5. Click Create

The Console also shows the equivalent gcloud command and REST API request for any resource you create — this is extremely useful for learning the CLI.

Customising the Console

• Pin services to the navigation menu for quick access
• Set a default project so you do not have to select one every time
• Use the search bar (keyboard shortcut: /) to quickly find services and resources
• Enable dark mode from the profile menu

---

Google Cloud Shell

Cloud Shell is a free, browser-based command-line environment that comes pre-installed with the Cloud SDK (gcloud, gsutil, bq), kubectl, Docker, Python, Node.js, Java, Go, and many other development tools.

Accessing Cloud Shell

There are two ways to access Cloud Shell:

1. Click the Cloud Shell icon (terminal icon) in the top-right corner of the Cloud Console
2. Navigate directly to shell.cloud.google.com

Key Features