Projects
Any Cloud Platform resources that you allocate and use must belong to a project. You can think of a project as the organizing entity for what you're building. A project is made up of the settings, permissions, and other metadata that describe your applications. Resources within a single project can work together easily, for example by communicating through an internal network, subject to the regions-and-zones rules. The resources that each project contains remain separate across project boundaries; you can only interconnect them through an external network connection.
Each Cloud Platform project has:
- A project name, which you provide.
- A project ID, which you can provide or Cloud Platform can provide for you.
- A project number, which Cloud Platform provides.
As you work with Cloud Platform, you'll use these identifiers in certain command lines and API calls. The following screenshot shows a project name, its ID, and number:
Each project ID is unique across Cloud Platform. Once you have created a project, you can delete the project but it's ID can never be used again.
When billing is enabled, each project is associated with one billing account. Multiple projects can have their resource usage billed to the same account.
A project serves as a namespace. This means every resource within each project must have a unique name, but you can usually reuse resource names if they are in separate projects. Some resource names must be globally unique. Refer to the documentation for the resource for details.
Ways to interact with the services
Cloud Platform gives you three basic ways to interact with the services and resources.
Google Cloud Platform Console
The Google Cloud Platform Console provides a web-based, graphical user interface that you can use to manage your Cloud Platform projects and resources. When you use the Cloud Platform Console, you create a new project, or choose an existing project, and use the resources that you create in the context of that project. You can create multiple projects, so you can use projects to separate your work in whatever way makes sense for you. For example, you might start a new project if you want to make sure only certain team members can access the resources in that project, while all team members can continue to access resources in another project.
Command-line interface
If you prefer to work in a terminal window, the Google Cloud SDK provides the
gcloud command-line tool, which gives you access to the commands you need. The gcloud tool can be used to manage both your development workflow and your Cloud Platform resources. See the gcloud reference for the complete list of available commands.Client libraries
The Cloud SDK includes client libraries that enable you to easily create and manage resources. Cloud Platform client libraries expose APIs for two main purposes:
- App APIs provide access to services. App APIs are optimized for supported languages, such as Node.js and Python. The libraries are designed around service metaphors, so you can work with the services more naturally and write less boilerplate code. The libraries also provide helpers for authentication and authorization.
- Admin APIs offer functionality for resource management. For example, you can use admin APIs if you want to build your own automated tools.
You also can use the Google API client libraries to access APIs for products such as Google Maps, Google Drive, and YouTube.
Pricing
To understand Google's principles about how pricing works on Cloud Platform, see the Pricing page. To understand pricing for individual services, see the product pricing section.
You can also take advantage of some tools to help you evaluate the costs of using Cloud Platform.
- The pricing calculator provides a quick and easy way to estimate what your Cloud Platform usage will look like. You can provide details about the services you want to use, such as the number of Compute Engine instances, persistent disks and their sizes, and so on, and then see a pricing estimate.
- The total cost of ownership (TCO) tool evaluates the relative costs for running your compute load in the cloud, and provides a financial estimate. The tool provides several inputs for cost modeling, which you can adjust, and then compares estimated costs on Cloud Platform and AWS. This tool does not model all components of a typical application, such as storage and networking.
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