Configurations in the Google Cloud SDK

The Google Cloud SDK and included tools like gcloud are heavily configurable. Many aspects of the SDK can be tweaked to modify core functionality and behavior to suit specific needs. When first using gcloud, we ran gcloud init. This command triggered a workflow that provisioned a few things for us:

• Created a default configuration to store initial configuration settings
• Set a network proxy if needed
• Performed a gcloud auth login to acquire an authorization token
• Set an initial value for the active Google Cloud project ID
• Set default Compute Engine configuration properties
• Stored user preferences for usage reporting

The result of running gcloud init is that tools like gcloud are more contextually aware of the environment they are operating in. These configuration properties can be viewed, modified, and deleted using the gcloud config command group.