Google Cloud Platform is Google's cloud computing platform, spanning compute, storage, machine learning, and data-analytics services. It's the #9 most-used cloud tool in the world, reported in roughly 24.6% of developer surveys, and it's especially strong in data and analytics (BigQuery) and container orchestration — Google originally created and open-sourced Kubernetes, which now runs natively as GKE. Data-heavy teams and ML practitioners favor it for that combination of managed data warehousing and cutting-edge AI tooling.
The gcloud CLI manages Google Cloud resources from the terminal — here's listing compute instances and querying BigQuery.
# list running Compute Engine instances
gcloud compute instances list
# deploy a container to Cloud Run (fully managed serverless)
gcloud run deploy my-service --image gcr.io/my-project/my-app --region us-central1
# run a query against BigQuery from the CLI
bq query --use_legacy_sql=false 'SELECT COUNT(*) FROM `my_dataset.events`'Create a free-tier Google Cloud account, install the gcloud CLI, then authenticate and set a default project.
# install the Google Cloud CLI, then initialize it
gcloud init
# authenticate your user account
gcloud auth login
# confirm the active project
gcloud config get-value project