Launching a Google Compute Instance via the API

You can never find enough of these tutorials/examples lying around, so here's one in golang borrowing heavily from google's own examples.

Create a Service Account

• Navigate to the IAM & admin" section of your project and select "Service Accounts"
• Create a new Account including the roles "Compute Admin" & "Service Account User"
• Ask for a new private key for download in JSON format

Extract and export your credentials

• In the downloaded JSON file, you'll see "client_email" & "private_key"
• $ export GCE_EMAIL=<client_email value>
• $ export GCE_PRIVATE_KEY='<private_key value>'
• keep in mind that some deploy services (looking at you, CircleCI) add these behind the scenes (meaning double single quotes and an incorrect key)

Play with the hardcoded bits

• This sample file launches an f1-micro instance named 'bluesbros2', running CoreOS in us-east-1 within my project
• Please adjust to your needs ;)
• Here's the list of OS images
• us-east-1 & f1-micro is special because you basically get one freebie / month!

SSH & gcloud access

• Before launching, you can add your own SSH keys (you'll always have console access from Google's embedded TTY)
• Every instance launched in your project will be accessible via the users/keys you setup here
• For even finer control of the Google Cloud offerings, consider downloading their gcloud tool (MacOS)
• Then you can run cmds like:

gcloud auth login
gcloud config set project <your projectID>
gcloud compute instances list
gcloud compute instances describe <your instance name> --format json

Launch your instance

• simply executing go run main.go will launch your instance