CCSC-Tutorial
Creating Instances
Redeem GCP Coupon
This will be handed out at the start of the tutorial. You’ll need to go to the following link to redeem the coupon:
https://console.cloud.google.com/education
I do not recommend redeeming this on your campus gmail if that is what you have as I know my campus google services are configured to not allow google cloud usage by default.
Redeeming Coupon
Clicking on that link will povide a dialog that looks like below:
In this form you should make sure you have your name and enter the GCP coupon that was handed out at the start of this tutorial.
Create Project
Now you can go to the Google Cloud Platform Console:
https://console.cloud.google.com/
When you first access the console you’ll need to accept the terms and conditions, and should get a dialog like the following that you should accept to move forward:
We’ll now be prompted to select a project and we’ll want to create a new project:
In the create a new project dialog you should give your project a name, like could say ccsc-tutorial for the project name. Make sure you select the “Billing Account for Education” in the billing account dropdown, that is the credit from the coupon you redeemed in a previous step. There is a chance it is called something different with the coupons in this tutorial. But once your configuration looks similar to below click create to create your project.
Create first VM
So now we should be able to see the dashboard for our new project that looks something like the following:
On the dashboard we can click directly on the “Create a VM” button to create a new VM. There is an alternative way to find this in the hamburger menu under compute instances as well. We will need enable the Compute Engine API to create VM instances on GCP. We should be directed to a page to do this when we clicked on the “Create a VM” button earlier that looks like this.
Once you’ve clicked on the “Enable API” button you’ll a bit before being directed to the Create an instance dialog. Should look something like this:
You can now give this first instance a name, I would recommend something like ccsc1 we will eventually have 3 of these instances. I have selected an N1 series machine and the n1-standard-1 machine type for the demo as these machines are the least expensive non-shared core instances. I’ve found this is extremely helpful when intially setting up GCP instances especially when in a classroom setting. After the nodes are setup and created you could change them to be an E2 series machine of the e2-micro machine type and it would cost less than a single one of these n1-standard-1 machines to run three of them continously. All the other defaults for the Machine configuration section can stick with the defaults. We’ll move on to the boot disk settings now.
For the boot disk settings we will just change the image type to be Ubuntu 22.04 LTS for an x86/64 system as GCP now supports arm instances, which our N1 series machien is not. Next we’ll need to expand the Advanced options:
Advanced Options
Once you click on the Advanced options dialog it will expand:
In there there are two further dialogs we will want to configure regarding the networking and SSH key access. Let’s work through the Networking details first:
In the Networking dialog what we want to do is click into the Networking interfaces section. This is where we can setup static IPs so that the machines will be consistently at the same network locations even if powered off.
In the Edit network interface dialog the first thing we want to do is change the Network Service Tier to Standard for this example we do not need the Premium Tier networking and that is most often also what I’ve recommended to my students. Then we’ll want to change the Primary internal IP settings:
When you click on the Primary internal IP settings it creates a dropdown like the one above that we’ll want to click to Reserve static internal ip address.
In the Reserve a static internal IP address” form you’ll need to give your IP reservation a name. I decided to name it ccsc1internal as this is the internal static IP for our ccsc1 VM instance. Make sure that the Purpose is set to Non-shared or the instance will not create as the Shared internal IPs are more for load balancing kind of operations related to web technologies. Once you click Reserve a fixed internal IP will be created, make sure to take note of this internal IP as we’ll need it later.
Optional Networking
It’s an optional step but now that we’re back in networking details, click on External IPv4 address and like with the internal IP click Create IP Address to launch the reservation form for an external IP address:
Now you will get the Reserve a new static IP address dialog. You like before need to name your static IP reservation, which for this machine I named ccsc1external
Optional SSH Key Access
Google Cloud Platform is amazing in that we can create these VM instances and interact with them entirely from a browser based terminal interface, which makes them an option for students on a Chromebook that need a Linux VM; however, this web terminal is not quite as responsive as a native terminal and you’ve SSH’d into the remote GCP instance. To get SSH access to these GCP instances you need to add public keys to the instance that are allowed access.
If we go back to the Security section under the Advanced Options we can see it has a further drop down to Manage Access.
After we click into the Manage Access drop down menu we can see a section to Add manually generated SSH keys this is where we can manually add SSH keys as items that we can use to access our VM instance. You could also setup project-wide SSH keys and then only need to check a box to reuse those same keys on future VMs.
When we click Add Item we’ll be given a form box to paste in our public key contents.
At the end of your public SSH keys there is always a section that is username@hostname that represents who you are on the machine that created the key. GCP will generate a new user account with the same username as this part of your key, you can change this in the form and your keys will still work.
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Now click Create and your first VM will be created.
Repeat
Do this again and make two more GCP compute instances. When you created your first VM you would be sent to the GCP instances page, where you can just click the Create Instance button to make another instance
