How to use Google Cloud SDK?
Let’s go through some practical examples of the services that can be accessed using Google Cloud SDK which is an easy way to interact with Google Cloud service. SDK refers to software development kit and it can enable one to run scripts or programs that help to automate tasks that are repetitive as for example in deploying virtual machines.
What are Cloud Client Libraries?
Google Cloud SDK contains cloud client libraries which allow the API access by program implemented in the supported language like Python, Ruby, PHP, C#, Java, Go, and Node. js. These libraries make it easier to call APIs and also contribute towards the reduction of the amount of code. They can be installed using package management tools such as pip and npm among others.

Prerequisites and Installation
Before we dive into the lab, let’s cover the prerequisites:
- A GCP account
- The right version of the desired client library (in this case, Python)
- Visual Studio Code (or your preferred IDE)
Install Google Cloud SDK
To install the Google Cloud SDK, go to https://cloud.google.com/sdk/docs/install-sdk and follow the instructions.

Download the Google Cloud CLI installer and follow the steps in the wizard to install the CLI.



Configuring the Service Account
After the SDK install we have to set up the Google Cloud service account and download the credentials. To do this, let’s generate a key for our service account and download the JSON file with the key.
For that, firstly Go to IAM and ADMIN and from there select “Service Account” from the left navigation menu.

Next, from the list of available Service Accounts click on the three dots besides your required Service Account and select Manage Keys.


Once you are on the Keys page, click on “ADD KEY” button and select “Create New Key”.

Then from the popup, select JSON and click on Create button.

Your private key will be saved on your computer.
Next, in order to view all the Service Accounts from your CLI, you have to run the following command. It will provide a list of all available Service Accounts along with their status

Using the Python Client Library
Now, let’s open Visual Studio Code and let’s start writing the Python program required for our project. We’ll access the BigQuery API through our Python Cloud Library.
First step is to let our IDE find our Service Account Credentials in order to connect us to the desired Google Cloud Service. For that we will create an environment variable that will contain the path of JSON file that contains the key for our Service Account.

Next, we’ll import the BigQuery client and create a BigQuery client. Next, we will come up with a query that will seek to get the ten most viewed questions with the tag Google BigQuery on the platform – stack overflow.
os.environ[“GOOGLE_APPLICATION_CREDENTIALS”] = “C:/Users/clicks/Downloads/oceanic-toolbox-352912-85c6285090dc.json”
from google.cloud import bigquery
client = bigquery.Client()
# Perform a query.
QUERY=(“””
SELECT
CONCAT(
‘https://stackoverflow.com/questions/’,
CAST(id as STRING)) as url,
view_count
FROM `bigquery-public-data.stackoverflow.posts_questions`
WHERE tags like ‘%google-bigquery%’
ORDER BY view_count DESC
LIMIT 10″””)

Now we need to make an API request:
query_job = client.query(QUERY)
results = query_job.result() # Waits for job to complete.
# Print result
for row in results:
print(“{} : {} views”.format(row.url, row.view_count)).
Running the Program
Finally, we’ll run our program in the terminal and see the results of our query. The above query will fetch the required data from the Stack Overflow platform
