The Cloud Software Development Kit (SDK) and the GCP

After you understand how to create a Google Cloud Platform (GCP) project and configure it to access the ML Engine, you’re ready to interact with your project. Google makes this possible through the Google SDK.

You can download the SDK. Clicking the Install button opens a page that provides instructions for downloading the SDK installer on your development system. Install all of the available components.

When you launch the installer, it asks you to log in to your account and grant privileges so that the SDK can access your GCP account. It also asks you to choose a cloud project to serve as the SDK’s default project. After you select this, all further SDK commands affect the default project.

After you install the SDK, you’re able to access two command-line utilities:

• gcloud: Provides general project interaction and accesses Google’s App Engine, Datastore, DNS, and ML Engine
• gsutil: Accesses Google Cloud Storage

If you’re running Windows, you can access these utilities through gcloud.cmd and gsutil.cmd. If you're running Linux or Mac OS, you can access them through the gcloud and gsutil executables.

Before you start using the SDK, you should make sure that you can access gcloud and gsutil from a command prompt. If you enter gcloud version and you don't see any version information, add the google-cloud-sdk/bin folder to your PATH environment variable.