You just installed the Google Cloud CLI on your new corporate laptop. You need to list the existing instances of your company on Google Cloud. What must you do before you run the gcloud compute instan

The `gcloud auth login` command is essential to authenticate your user account with Google Cloud, establishing the necessary permissions context for the CLI to interact with your resources.

While service accounts are used for programmatic access, for a user on a corporate laptop, authenticating with their user account via `gcloud auth login` is the standard and simpler approach for interactive CLI use.

Cloud Identity user account keys are not a standard authentication mechanism for `gcloud CLI`; users authenticate interactively via a web browser flow initiated by `gcloud auth login`.

Setting the default zone using `gcloud config set compute/zone` is important for commands that operate on zonal resources (like creating an instance), but `gcloud compute instances list` can list instances across all zones in a project even if a default zone isn't set, making it not a *must-do* before this specific command, though good practice for many other `gcloud compute` commands.

The `gcloud compute instances list` command operates within a specific project, so setting the default project using `gcloud config set project` ensures the command targets the correct environment without needing to specify `--project` every time.