To interact with your Google Distributed Cloud (GDC) air-gapped universe, you must configure one or more of the following tools:
- GDC console: the primary graphical user interface for GDC air-gapped.
- gdcloud CLI: the primary command-line interface (CLI) for GDC air-gapped.
- kubectl CLI: the Kubernetes CLI used for managing Kubernetes Resource Model (KRM) APIs.
- Terraform: an infrastructure-as-code (IaC) tool that manages KRM APIs using the Terraform Kubernetes provider.
These tools help you deploy and manage applications, manage infrastructure, and view resources in your GDC environment.
This document is for all operators, administrators, and developers who deploy and manage resources in GDC. For more information about audience groups in GDC, see Audiences for GDC air-gapped documentation.
GDC console
The GDC console is a graphical user interface that lets you manage your GDC projects and resources. From the GDC console, you can perform various tasks such as monitoring your workloads, managing access to resources, and viewing audit logs.
To access the GDC console, open the GDC URL provided by your infrastructure operator group in a web browser. You must authenticate with your identity provider to sign in.
For more information, see GDC console access.
gdcloud CLI
The gdcloud CLI is a GDC air-gapped command-line tool dedicated for managing resources in a disconnected environment. The gdcloud CLI provides capabilities such as the following:
- Customizable configurations and properties
- Authentication for clusters, API servers, and zonal and global contexts
- Autocompletion
- Accessibility
For more information, see Use the gdcloud CLI.
For reference documentation of all gdcloud CLI commands, see the gdcloud reference overview.
kubectl CLI
The Kubernetes CLI tool, kubectl, lets you create and manage GDC resources by calling the underlying Kubernetes Resource Model (KRM) APIs. For example, you can use the kubectl CLI to deploy virtual machines (VM), inspect and manage cluster resources, and view logs.
The majority of API procedures in GDC documentation require the kubectl CLI.
Before you can use the kubectl CLI to manage resources, you must
install the kubectl CLI tool and then
authenticate with the GDC cluster or API server that
hosts your resource with a kubeconfig file. The gdcloud CLI provides
the get-credentials command
to generate kubeconfig files automatically, or you can
generate a kubeconfig file manually.
Terraform
HashiCorp Terraform is an infrastructure-as-code (IaC) tool that lets you provision and manage infrastructure resources. In GDC, you can use Terraform to manage your resources by interacting with Kubernetes APIs. GDC uses the Kubernetes provider to give Terraform access to the Kubernetes APIs.
For more information about Terraform in GDC, see the Terraform overview.
To quickly set up Terraform in your GDC environment, see Use Terraform.