Google Developer Console

Before Google Cloud Platform was released, Admin Console was the only tool available to developers to perform administrative and monitoring tasks on App Engine applications. Admin Console provides a lot of functionalities and it's still powerful enough to manage App Engine applications of any size. However, it's not the right tool if we extensively use the new range of services offered by the Google Cloud Platform, especially if we store data on Google Cloud Storage or our database server is Google Cloud SQL; in this case, to collect information such as billing data and usage history we have to interact with other tools.

Recently Google released Developer Console, a comprehensive tool to manage and monitor services, resources, authentication, and billing information for Google Cloud Platform, including App Engine applications. We can access the Developer Console at https://console.developers.google.com/ and log in with a valid Google user account or a Google apps account for custom domains.

To emphasize the concept that developers can combine various pieces coming from Google's cloud infrastructure to build complex applications, Developer Console introduces the notion of cloud projects. A project is a set of functionally grouped cloud products that share the same team and billing information. At the core of a project there is always an App Engine application: every time we create a project, an App Engine application pops up in Admin Console. Simultaneously, when we register an application in Admin Console, a corresponding project is created and listed in Developer Console. Every project is identified by a descriptive name, which is a unique identifier called project ID that is also the ID of the related App Engine application and another unique identifier that is automatically generated called project number.

Beside creating and deleting projects, the developer console also let us do the following:

For every service of Google Cloud Platform, Developer Console provides us with handy tools to perform maintenance operations through the web interface. For example, we can add or remove Google Cloud SQL instances, perform queries on Google Cloud Datastore, browse and manipulate the content of Google Cloud Storage, and manage virtual machines running on Google Compute Engine. We will use several parts of Developer Console later in the book.