Dev Tools/Simulate Outside GCP accounts for dev & testing

Hello @tiana ,

Thank you for your interesting questions. Yes, As far as I know there are a few sandbox or resources associated to being able to simulate outside GCP accounts that are not tied to your account for testing OAuth/account permissions, multi-tenancy, etc. Here are a few of them:

• Google Cloud Identity and Access Management (IAM) sandbox: This sandbox allows you to create and manage IAM users, groups, and roles without affecting your production environment. This can be useful for testing OAuth/account permissions and multi-tenancy.

• Google Cloud Pub/Sub emulator: This emulator allows you to create and publish messages to a Pub/Sub topic without actually having to create a Pub/Sub account. This can be useful for testing applications that rely on Pub/Sub.

• Google Cloud Shell: The Cloud Shell is a web-based terminal that allows you to run commands on Google's infrastructure. This means that you can use the Cloud Shell to create and manage GCP resources, even if you don't have a GCP account.

• Google Cloud Test Environments: Google Cloud Test Environments is a suite of tools that allow you to create and manage isolated test environments in the cloud. This can be useful for testing applications that require access to specific GCP resources.  

• Google Cloud Sandbox Environment: This environment provisions an isolated, contained environment that helps you and your team to securely evaluate, explore, and build non-production workloads for testing purposes without having to worry about any mishap. This tools already mention by @valdecir.carvalho 

• BigQuery sandbox:  BigQuery sandbox is a free tool that enables you to examine limited BigQuery capabilities without any cost to determine if it meets your needs. 

• GKE Sandbox : GKE Sandbox provides an extra layer of security to prevent untrusted code from affecting the host kernel on your cluster nodes.

• Emulate Cloud Spanner locally:  This emulator offers the same APIs as the Spanner production service and is intended for local development and testing, not for production deployments.

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Here is a video post below for tips and trick on Serverless application testing and developing mention by Google cloud developer advocate :

In addition to these sandboxes and resources, there are also a number of third-party tools that can be used to simulate outside GCP accounts. Some of these tools include:

• Faker is a Python library that can be used to generate fake data, including fake email addresses, phone numbers, and credit card numbers. This data can be used to create test accounts that simulate real users.
• Mockoon is a tool that allows you to create and manage API mocks. API mocks can be used to simulate external APIs, and they can be used to test applications that rely on those APIs.
• Postman is a tool that allows you to test APIs. Postman can be used to send requests to APIs, and it can also be used to simulate external APIs.
   
   

The best way to simulate outside GCP accounts for dev & testing depends on your specific needs. If you need a realistic environment to test your applications, then the Google Cloud IAM sandbox or the Google Cloud Pub/Sub emulator may be a good option. If you need to save money on GCP resources, then the Google Cloud Shell or a third-party tool like Faker may be a good option. Also, Here are some resourceful links below on application development and testing on Google cloud.

• https://cloudacademy.com/course/building-and-testing-applications-on-google-cloud-platform/introduction/
• https://contactchanaka.medium.com/containerised-developer-testing-environment-on-google-cloud-platform-2ea6117a6009

I hope this will helps you for your starting point.