handy-links.md

Handy Links

Google Cloud Platform

• Google Cloud Platform (GCP) home page.
  We're using only a few of these services.

• Cloud Console -- web console to manage your GCP project components.

  NOTE: Open the ☰ menu (pronounced "hamburger") in the top left corner to access all the sub-console pages.
  The relevant sub-consoles are: Compute Engine, Storage, Logging, Container Registry, IAM, and Cloud Build.

  Tip: Pin the Compute Engine VM instances, Storage Browser, and Logging - Logs Viewer sub-consoles to the top of the ☰ menu.

• GCP documentation:

  • GCP Overview -- the basic concepts

  • Enterprise onboarding checklist -- a checklist with expandable details for all the setup that's useful for an "enterprise"
    NOTE: For our purposes, you'll at least need a Google account and a GCP project with billing enabled. The project does not need to be part of an organization.

  • Google Cloud SDK documentation -- development tools including the gcloud and gsutil command line tools

    • gcloud command line reference
    • Google Cloud Client Libraries

  • Compute Engine documentation (GCE) -- Compute Engine lets you create and run virtual machines on Google infrastructure.
    (GCP also offers specialized ways to run code including App Engine, Cloud Functions, and Cloud Run. Those don't seem sufficiently general purpose for our purposes, e.g. tasks that need many GB of RAM and disk space.)

    • GCE VM Instances console

  • Cloud Storage documentation (GCS) -- GCP's native way to store data.

    • Cloud Filestore documentation -- NFS file servers
      You can use this if you need full NFS file servers but it costs 10x as much as GCS and it's less scalable.

  • Cloud Build documentation -- a service that can build your Docker containers

  • Container Registry documentation -- stores your Docker Images

  • Cloud IAM -- Identity and Access Management to manage access permissions for Google Cloud resources

  • Cloud Billing

Other tools

• Docker desktop for building and running Docker Container Images on your desktop.
• gcsfuse is a tool for mounting GCS buckets onto your computer's file system. It's the easiest and most flexible way to access GCS files. You'll need to install it and setup to authenticate for gcsfuse.