Using Ansible with GCP

Basic, no frills, single file playbooks to provision, run tasks and terminate a vm.

Ansible control machine is running Mac OS 10.15.1

ansible --version = 2.9.0

Prerequisites

• Necessary libraries have been installed on Ansible control machine. Link
• GCP Service Account credentials have been created and downloaded. See Ansible GCP Guide. Link
• GCP SSH Keypair has been created locally and the public key has been uploaded to the GCP | Computer Engine | Metadata | SSH Keys. Note that this will give project wide access to ssh to linux computer instances and may be undesired. In this case i'm using 'gce-user' and have an associated ssh keypair. (Keypair name is referenced in the playbook). Link

Notes

• Default network is being used which already has the pre-populated firewall rules setup for remote access via ssh.

Provision a basic VM (Red Hat Enterprise Linux)

Playbook run-time : ~ 5 mins

This playbook will:

1. Launch an google compute engine rhel instance
2. Connect via ssh to the external IP of the new instance
3. Gather facts on the instance
4. Reboot the instance
5. Terminate the instance

• <gcp_project> value = path to the GCP Service account
• <gcp_cred_file> value = path to the GCP Service account credentials file. e.g ~/gcp_creds/cred_file.json
• <ansible_ssh_private_key_file> value = path to private key file. e.g ~/.ssh/my_key

ansible-playbook launch_gcp_compute_rhel.yml --extra-vars '{"gcp_project":"value","gcp_cred_file":"value","ansible_ssh_private_key_file":"value" }'

Provision a basic VM (Windows Server 2016)

Coming soon....