Before we start working with Google IoT, we have to activate the Google Cloud console. To activate GCP, we need a Google account. Open your browser to https://cloud.google.com/ and click on Sign in and Try free.

The next steps depend on where you are connecting from. Generally speaking, you will have to carry out the following activities:

• Agree to the terms and conditions.
• Provide a payment method. Google will only charge after the free period. Normally, this is 300 days or up to $300 worth of services. 
• Then, create a project and activate the Google IoT Core API.

Google requires you to create a project space before starting. This can be done as follows:

1. Click on the console available at https://console.cloud.google.com.

2. From the project bar, we can create a new project. The following screenshot shows the New Project page:

3. Then, we have to choose the language and confirm the creation of the project. GCP uses the project to segregate the environment. In this chapter, we will call this project iiot-book.

4. After the project has been created, select the project, access Home page, and pin the following services from the menu on the left:

The preceding steps are shown in the following screenshot:

We are now ready to work with IoT Core and the other technologies. The first time we use it, GCP asks us to enable APIs for every service that we want to work with. GCP provides an easy command-line interface for this called gcloud.