Why gcloud CLI matters for automation in GCP - See It in Action

Why gcloud CLI matters for automation

📖 Scenario: You work as a cloud engineer managing Google Cloud resources. You want to automate tasks like creating virtual machines and managing storage without clicking through the web console every time.

🎯 Goal: Build a simple script using the gcloud command-line tool to automate creating a virtual machine instance and listing storage buckets.

📋 What You'll Learn

Create a variable holding the name of a new VM instance

Create a variable holding the name of a storage bucket

Write a gcloud command to create the VM instance using the variable

Write a gcloud command to list storage buckets

💡 Why This Matters

🌍 Real World

Cloud engineers use gcloud CLI scripts to automate repetitive tasks like creating and managing virtual machines and storage, saving time and reducing errors.

💼 Career

Knowing how to automate cloud tasks with gcloud CLI is essential for roles like cloud engineer, DevOps engineer, and site reliability engineer.

1

Set up VM instance name variable

Create a variable called vm_instance_name and set it to the string "auto-vm-01".

GCP

# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use simple assignment like variable = "value".

2

Set up storage bucket name variable

Create a variable called storage_bucket_name and set it to the string "auto-bucket-01".

GCP

vm_instance_name = "auto-vm-01"
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Similar to step 1, assign the bucket name string to the variable.

3

Write gcloud command to create VM instance

Write a string variable called create_vm_command that holds the exact command: gcloud compute instances create {vm_instance_name} --zone=us-central1-a using the vm_instance_name variable inside the string with an f-string.

GCP

vm_instance_name = "auto-vm-01"
storage_bucket_name = "auto-bucket-01"
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use an f-string to insert the variable inside the command string.

4

Write gcloud command to list storage buckets

Write a string variable called list_buckets_command that holds the exact command: gcloud storage buckets list.

GCP

vm_instance_name = "auto-vm-01"
storage_bucket_name = "auto-bucket-01"
create_vm_command = f"gcloud compute instances create {vm_instance_name} --zone=us-central1-a"
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Assign the exact command string to the variable.