Before we begin diving into the various ways of interacting with GCP, you'll need to either create or join a Google Cloud project. But first, what is a project? A project is the fundamental organizational component of Google Cloud, containing cloud resources, collaborators, permissions, and billing information. For cloud resources, projects help associate things such as networks, virtual machines, and databases, and segregate them in a logical manner. For users and permissions, projects makes it easy to define team roles and their associated rights.
Services and accounts in one project will be walled off from resources in other projects unless explicitly enabled. This provides a fundamental layer of security that can be built upon further via Google's Identity & Access Management (IAM) system and the principle of least...