Alpha and beta channels

The Google Cloud SDK makes both alpha and beta channels available as components within the SDK itself. These channels contain experimental versions of all the standard gcloud commands, as well as many commands and components that are entirely unavailable in the mainstream release. This is usually the case with commands for products and services that are themselves in alpha or beta release.

Google often implements very long beta windows before releasing new products and features as generally available. This is good in that generally available products and features are more well-tested and feature-complete. The flip side of this is that many teams will forego the Service Level Agreement (SLA) and quality guarantee of waiting for features to become generally available, choosing instead to develop against beta (and possibly alpha) releases. This is often the case when the General Availability (GA) release of the product or feature is expected to land before the team is ready to go to production. To get started using alpha and beta features within gcloud, simply run gcloud components install <alpha|beta>. The commands for these channels will then live in new command groups as gcloud alpha <COMMAND …> and gcloud beta <COMMAND …>. This grouping strategy allows the alpha and beta commands to live alongside the mainstream commands without them affecting each other. After installing the alpha and beta components, they will receive regular updates along with the rest of the SDK.