Mastering Google Cloud Console: Features, Use cases and Best Practices

Compute Engine, 

Cloud Pub/Sub topics, 

Virtual machines, 

Cloud storage buckets, 

App Engine instances, etc. 

Home dashboard: provides an overview of your Google Cloud project including billing, and “getting started guides”. 

Google Cloud projects: you can click on the available project name to switch to a different project. 

Resources: once you switch to a new project you can see the resources for another project. 

New project: you can also create a new project.

Left navigation menu: you can see this on the top-left corner of the dashboard. It helps you to access your Google Cloud Services. 

Favorite products: on the navigation menu you can pin your favorite products. 

Search bar: you can use this to quickly search for Google Cloud products, documentation, and resources. 

Enabling the Cloud Storage API for a project

You can use the Google Cloud console to enable the Cloud API for a project. A cloud storage API enables accessing, adding, updating, and deleting data from remote cloud storage. 

Creating buckets

You can create buckets in the Google Cloud console. On the Create a bucket page, you can enter your bucket information and create the bucket. 

Deleting buckets

The same way you create a bucket in the Google Cloud console, you can also delete a bucket. You should note that deleting a bucket also deletes any objects and information stored within the bucket. They cannot be recovered.

Home: shows info about active resources and billing. 

Dashboard: includes information about the currently active project the user is working on. It can also update on several parameters like APIs, Resources, Instances, Billing, etc.

Activity: holds information about the user’s recent activity, and history of all actions performed by the user. It includes tasks such as making or deleting instances, creating a new project, deploying/editing/deleting a new cluster, or setting up a new Virtual Machine (VM).

Recommendations: Google suggestions to improve the user experience, based on your work experience on the Google Console Platform.

Choose the Right Instance Types

Using Google Cloud Console you can select the GCP project that you want to access from the console top navigation bar. Choosing the right instance type helps you to  improve performance as well as reduce costs. 

Use Automatic Scaling

You can set up auto scaling on Google Cloud Platform with the help of Google Cloud Console. This feature allows you to manage the creation and deletion of new servers in your network automatically. It allows you to scale your application according to different loads. 

Use Preemptible Instances

You can create and use Preemptible virtual machine (VM) Instances with Google Cloud Console. Once you create preemptible instances you can then Start a preempted VM and manage preemption with a shutdown script. 

Leverage Custom Machine Types

Custom machine types is a feature of Compute Engine that allows you quickly create a machine type according to your requirements. With the help of custom machine types you can create virtual machines, improve performance and optimize your costs. 

Optimize Networking

By optimizing networking you can improve the performance and security of your GCP environment. It will also help to improve performance and reduce costs.