Web Apps for GCP Services
Google Cloud is superb once you know it and impassable when you don't. These applications wrap the specific operations a team needed into interfaces built for the person doing the task rather than for the platform exposing it.
Data processing jobs run on Dataproc clusters, dashboards manage datasets in Cloud Storage, and BigQuery table creation is automated instead of hand-run.
Context
A cloud console is designed to expose every capability of the platform. That is the correct goal for the console and the wrong one for somebody who needs to run the same job every Tuesday.
Approach
Each application covers one job end to end: submitting the Dataproc work, managing the datasets it reads from in GCS, and automating the BigQuery tables it writes into. The interface is named after the task rather than after the service, which is most of what makes it usable.
A Razorpay integration handles payments where the workflow needed them, so the transaction is part of the same flow rather than a separate errand.
What it taught me
- Wrapping a cloud service is not dumbing it down — it is picking the five operations that matter and refusing to expose the other two hundred.