Activate Google Cloud Shell

Google Cloud Shell is a virtual machine that is loaded with development tools. It offers a
persistent 5GB home directory and runs on the Google Cloud. Google Cloud Shell
provides command-line access to your GCP resources.

1. In GCP console, on the top right toolbar, click the Open Cloud Shell button

2. In the dialog box that opens, click START CLOUD SHELL:

You can click "START CLOUD SHELL" immediately when the dialog box opens.
It takes a few moments to provision and connect to the environment. When you are
connected, you are already authenticated, and the project is set to your PROJECT_ID. For
example:
gcloud is the command-line tool for Google Cloud Platform. It comes pre-installed on
Cloud Shell and supports tab-completion.
You can list the active account name with this command:

gcloud auth list

Output:

Credentialed accounts:
- <myaccount>@<mydomain>.com (active)
Example output:

Credentialed accounts:
- [email protected]
You can list the project ID with this command:

gcloud config list project

Output:

[core]
project = <project_ID>
Example output:

[core]
project = qwiklabs-gcp-44776a13dea667a6
Full documentation of gcloud is available on Google Cloud gcloud Overview.

Understanding Regions and Zones

Certain Compute Engine resources live in regions or zones. A region is a specific

geographical location where you can run your resources. Each region has one or more
zones. For example, the us-central1 region denotes a region in the Central United States
that has zones us-central1-a, us-central1-b, us-central1-c, and us-central1-f.
Resources that live in a zone are referred to as zonal resources. Virtual machine Instances
and persistent disks live in a zone. To attach a persistent disk to a virtual machine
instance, both resources must be in the same zone. Similarly, if you want to assign a static
IP address to an instance, the instance must be in the same region as the static IP.

Learn more about regions and zones and see a complete list in Regions & Zones documentation.

Create a new instance from the Cloud Console

In this section, you'll learn how to create new pre-defined machine types with Google
Compute Engine from the Cloud Console.

In the GCP Console, on the top left of the screen, select Navigation menu > Compute
Engine > VM Instances:

This may take a minute to initialize for the first time.

To create a new instance, click Create.

There are many parameters you can configure when creating a new instance. Use the
following for this lab:

Field Value Additional Information

Name gcelab Name for the VM instance

us-central1 (Iowa)
or Learn more about regions in Regions &
Region
Zones documentation.
asia-south1 (Mumbai)

us-central1-c
or
Learn more about zones in Regions & Zones
Zone
asia-south1-c documentation.
Note: remember the zone that you
selected, you'll need it later.

2 vCPUs
This is a (n1-standard-2),

2-CPU, 7.5GB RAM instance. Note: A new project has a default resource
Machine quota, which may limit the number of CPU
Type cores. You can request more when you work
There are a number of machine
on projects outside of this lab.
types, ranging from micro instance
types to 32-core/208GB RAM
instance types. Learn more in
the Machine Types documentation.

There are a number of images to choose

New 10 GB standard from, including: Debian, Ubuntu, CoreOS as
Boot persistent disk well as premium images such as Red Hat
Disk OS Image: Debian Enterprise Linux and Windows Server. See
GNU/Linux 9 (stretch) Operating System documentation for more
detail.

Check Allow HTTP traffic

Note: This will automatically create firewall
Firewall Check this option so to access a
rule to allow HTTP traffic on port 80.
webserver that you'll install later.

Click Create.
Wait for it to finish - it shouldn't take more than a minute.

Once finished, you should see the new virtual machine in the VM Instances page.
To SSH into the virtual machine, click on SSH on the right hand side. This launches a SSH
client directly from your browser.

Note: For more information, see the Connect to an instance using ssh documentation.
Install a NGINX web server

Now you'll install NGINX web server, one of the most popular web servers in the world, to
connect your virtual machine to something.

Once SSH'ed, get root access using sudo:

sudo su -
As the root user, update your OS:
apt-get update
(Output)

Get:1 http://security.debian.org stretch/updates InRelease [94.3 kB]

Ign http://deb.debian.org strech InRelease
Get:2 http://deb.debian.org strech-updates InRelease [91.0 kB]
...
Install NGINX:

apt-get install nginx -y

(Output)

Reading package lists... Done

Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
The following additional packages will be installed:
...
Check that NGINX is running:

ps auwx | grep nginx

(Output)

root 2330 0.0 0.0 159532 1628 ? Ss 14:06 0:00 nginx: master process
/usr/sbin/nginx -g daemon on; master_process on;
www-data 2331 0.0 0.0 159864 3204 ? S 14:06 0:00 nginx: worker process
www-data 2332 0.0 0.0 159864 3204 ? S 14:06 0:00 nginx: worker process
root 2342 0.0 0.0 12780 988 pts/0 S+ 14:07 0:00 grep nginx
Awesome! To see the web page, go to the Cloud Console and click the External IP link
of the virtual machine instance. You can also see the web page by adding the External
IP to http://EXTERNAL_IP/ in a new browser window or tab.
 You should see this default web page:

To check your progress in this lab, click Check my progress below. A checkmark means
you're on track.
Create a Compute Engine instance and add Nginx Server to your instance with necessary firewall rules.
Check my progress

Create a new instance with gcloud

Rather than using the GCP Console to create a virtual machine instance, you can use the
command line tool gcloud, which is pre-installed in Google Cloud Shell. Cloud Shell is a
Debian-based virtual machine loaded with all the development tools you'll need
(gcloud, git, and others) and offers a persistent 5GB home directory.
If you want to try this on your own machine in the future, read the gcloud command line
tool guide.
In the Cloud Shell, create a new virtual machine instance from the command line
using gcloud, replacing [YOUR_ZONE] with one of the zone choices given earlier:
gcloud compute instances create gcelab2 --machine-type n1-standard-2 --zone [your_zone]
(Output)

Created [...gcelab2].
NAME ZONE MACHINE_TYPE ... STATUS
gcelab2 us-central1-c n1-standard-2 ... RUNNING
Click Check my progress below to verify you're on track in this lab.
Create a new instance with gcloud.
Check my progress
The instance created has these default values:

 The latest Debian 9 (stretch) image.

 The n1-standard-2 machine type. In this lab you can select one of these other machine
types if you'd like: n1-highmem-4 or n1-highcpu-4. When you're working on a project
outside of Qwiklabs, you can also specify a custom machine type.
 A root persistent disk with the same name as the instance; the disk is automatically
attached to the instance.
Run gcloud compute instances create --help to see all the defaults.
Note: You can set the default region and zones that gcloud uses if you are always
working within one region/zone and you don't want to append the --zone flag every time.
Do this by running these commands :
gcloud config set compute/zone ...
gcloud config set compute/region ...
To exit help, press Ctrl+c.
Check out your instances. Select Navigation menu > Compute Engine > VM instances.
You should see the 2 instances you created in this lab.

Finally, you can SSH into your instance using gcloud as well. Make sure you add your
zone, or omit the --zone flag if you've set the option globally:
gcloud compute ssh gcelab2 --zone [YOUR_ZONE]
(Output)

WARNING: The public SSH key file for gcloud does not exist.
WARNING: The private SSH key file for gcloud does not exist.
WARNING: You do not have an SSH key for gcloud.
WARNING: [/usr/bin/ssh-keygen] will be executed to generate a key.
This tool needs to create the directory
[/home/gcpstaging306_student/.ssh] before being able to generate SSH
Keys.
Now you'll type Y to continue.
Do you want to continue? (Y/n)
Enter through the passphrase section to leave the passphrase empty.
Generating public/private rsa key pair.
Enter passphrase (empty for no passphrase)
After connecting, you disconnect from SSH by exiting from the remote shell:

exit

Congratulations!
Google Compute Engine is the foundation to GCP's Infrastructure-as-a-Service. You
created a virtual machine with Compute Engine and can now map your existing server
infrastructure, load balancers, and network topology to GCP.