Command groups

A group is a set of commands that are tied to a specific aspect of Google Cloud. Most of these relate to Google Cloud products and services. For example, all operations tied to managing and interacting with Cloud SQL are organized under the gcloud sql group.

In addition to product-specific groups, some groups are specific to managing the Google Cloud SDK itself. These groups include auth, components, config, and topic, which we will be looking at in the following sections. In addition, gcloud contains two special command groups: alpha and beta. These groups are not enabled by default and provide a secondary set of command groups for commands that are not yet considered generally available.

Commands across groups follow a uniform standard that makes it easy to find your way around. In general, you'll specify a command group, a type of resource, an action, and any identifiers and flags. Actions usually include standard CRUD operations, as well as any product-specific operations. For Compute Engine, for example, gcloud contains commands for standard CRUD operations as well as commands for starting and stopping VMs and managing disks.

Commands that relate to GCP products and services are very similar in structure to their underlying APIs. The command gcloud compute instances list --zone <ZONE> would be the equivalent to making an API call to https://www.googleapis.com/compute/v1/projects/<PROJECT_ID>/zones/<ZONE>/instances.