What is the Google Cloud Console and Cloud Shell?

The Google Cloud Console is the web-based UI for managing GCP resources, monitoring usage, viewing logs, and configuring services. It provides dashboards, resource browsers, and built-in editors. Cloud Shell is a free, browser-based terminal with a persistent 5GB home directory, pre-installed with the gcloud CLI, Docker, kubectl, Terraform, and other development tools. It provides a small VM (f1-micro) provisioned on demand. Cloud Shell is ideal for quick tasks without needing to install tools locally. The Cloud SDK (gcloud CLI) is the command-line interface for managing GCP programmatically. Key commands: gcloud compute instances list, gcloud container clusters get-credentials, gsutil cp (Cloud Storage), bq query (BigQuery).