How to connect to the Google Compute Engine / Cloud

Firstly we download the Google Cloud SDK installer:
https://cloud.google.com/sdk/

Upon installation, launch the Google Cloud SDK Shell and type the following to authneticate with Google Cloud:
gcloud auth login

We can list all of the projects we currently have:
gcloud preview projects list

We shall set the default project we will be working with:
gcloud config set project <project-id>

We can now return a list of the vm instances:
gcloud compute instances list