Activate service account

Auth as SA in CI; note: prefer workload identity over long-lived key files

gcloud auth activate-service-account --key-file=key.json && gcloud config set project <id>

More gcloud commands

GKE kubeconfig credentials

gcloud container clusters get-credentials <cluster> --region <id> --project <id>

Fetch GKE kubeconfig; modern: needs gke-gcloud-auth-plugin in PATH since k8s 1.26
List instances with external IP

gcloud compute instances list --format="table(name,status,EXTERNAL_IP)" --filter="status=RUNNING"

Custom table of running VMs and public IPs via --format/--filter projections
Flatten IAM bindings by member

gcloud projects get-iam-policy <id> --flatten="bindings[].members" --format="table(bindings.role,bindings.members)"

Audit who has which role; --flatten explodes nested bindings into rows
Read recent error logs

gcloud logging read 'severity>=ERROR' --limit 20 --freshness=1h --format='value(timestamp,resource.type,textPayload)'

Pull last hour of errors across project; --freshness avoids full scan
SSH via IAP tunnel

gcloud compute ssh <name> --zone <id> --tunnel-through-iap

Reach a VM with no public IP through Identity-Aware Proxy; no bastion needed