This is a simple how-to for provisioning a VM instance on the Google Cloud Platform. This is intended for example purposes and the VM will mostly have default configuration. The VM size chosen fits into the Always Free usage tier.
We’re using the gcloud CLI tool here from the Cloud
SDK. Refer to quickstarts
documentation to get it
installed and setup.
If you haven’t yet used the gcloud tool, take a few minutes to get
familiar with it. Most importantly, note that you can almost always get
detailed help on available commands and parameters they take by
appending --help to the end of the command.
For example, you can get a list of all groups and commands with:
gcloud --help
To then read the documentation for the Google Compute Engine group, run:
gcloud compute --help
And of course you can get detailed help on any gcloud compute command:
gcloud compute instance --help
This makes GCP one of the best-documented CLI tools around and the documentation quality resembles that of the BSDs.
Going back to creating a VM, you can probably guess where you can read help on what parameters are available when creating a VM:
gcloud compute instances create --help
Lets get started, here’s a complete command, we’ll go over it next::
gcloud compute instances create vm-01 --description=vm-01 \
--boot-disk-size=30GB --boot-disk-type=pd-standard \
--image-project=debian-cloud --machine-type=f1-micro \
--metadata=env=dev --image-family=debian-8 --zone=us-west1-a
- Debian 8 (Jessie) VM called vm-
01 - with a 30GB persistent storage HDD
- of size `f1-micro
- metadata key
envwith valuedev - in
us-west1-aavailability zone
Note that the Debian 8 image is 10GB in size and by allocating a larger disk to this VM, the image will automatically expand the root partition to the size of the disk.
When the command finishes, you’ll see a summary:
Created [https://www.googleapis.com/compute/v1/projects/<name_of_your_project>/zones/us-west1-a/instances/vm-01].
NAME ZONE MACHINE_TYPE PREEMPTIBLE INTERNAL_IP EXTERNAL_IP STATUS
vm-01 us-west1-a f1-micro 10.138.0.2 104.196.xxx.xx RUNNING
At this point the VM is ready for action and you can ssh into it by
using the gcloud compute ssh command:
gcloud compute ssh vm-01
This will generate an SSH keypair, stored under
$HOME/.ssh/google_compute_engine by default, and upload it to the VM
so it can be used for authentication.
That’s it, we’re up and running.
Since the Always Free tier only allows instances in US region, I’m curious to see how much bandwidth I’ll have from my home and Digital Ocean VM in Singapore. International bandwith in Asia is often congested and its not uncommon to have very poor bandwidth to both US and Europe (by “very poor” I mean under 20mbps).
Lets install iperf3 and see what we get, but before
we proceed, we first need to open a firewall port to allow iperf3
traffic, which is 5201 by default. Again this is easily accomplished
with gcloud tool:
gcloud compute firewall-rules create allow-iperf --allow tcp:5201
Test from my MyRepublic home connection (1gbps down, 500mbps up):
iperf3 -c 104.196.xxx.xx
Connecting to host 104.196.xxx.xx, port 5201
[ 4] local 66.96.xxx.xx port 64870 connected to 104.196.xxx.xx port 5201
[ ID] Interval Transfer Bandwidth Retr Cwnd
[ 4] 0.00-1.00 sec 270 KBytes 2.21 Mbits/sec 0 102 MBytes
[ 4] 1.00-2.00 sec 2.68 MBytes 22.5 Mbits/sec 0 1.06 GBytes
[ 4] 2.00-3.00 sec 9.22 MBytes 77.4 Mbits/sec 0 -1184092356.00 Bytes
[ 4] 3.00-4.00 sec 11.1 MBytes 93.3 Mbits/sec 0 -1184092356.00 Bytes
[ 4] 4.00-5.00 sec 11.2 MBytes 93.6 Mbits/sec 0 -1184092356.00 Bytes
[ 4] 5.00-6.00 sec 10.7 MBytes 89.4 Mbits/sec 0 -1184092356.00 Bytes
[ 4] 6.00-7.00 sec 10.6 MBytes 88.5 Mbits/sec 0 -1184092356.00 Bytes
[ 4] 7.00-8.00 sec 10.7 MBytes 90.2 Mbits/sec 0 -1184092356.00 Bytes
[ 4] 8.00-9.00 sec 10.8 MBytes 90.6 Mbits/sec 0 -1184092356.00 Bytes
[ 4] 9.00-10.00 sec 10.7 MBytes 89.4 Mbits/sec 0 -1184092356.00 Bytes
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
[ ID] Interval Transfer Bandwidth Retr
[ 4] 0.00-10.00 sec 87.9 MBytes 73.7 Mbits/sec 0 sender
[ 4] 0.00-10.00 sec 87.9 MBytes 73.7 Mbits/sec receiver
iperf Done.
73.7mbps is actually really good. Lets see how Digital Ocean Singapore VM compares to this:
iperf3 -c 104.196.xxx.xx
Connecting to host 104.196.xxx.xx, port 5201
[ 4] local 128.199.xxx.xxx port 41077 connected to 104.196.xxx.xx port 5201
[ ID] Interval Transfer Bandwidth Retr Cwnd
[ 4] 0.00-1.00 sec 1.40 MBytes 11.7 Mbits/sec 0 440 KBytes
[ 4] 1.00-2.00 sec 16.2 MBytes 136 Mbits/sec 0 4.23 MBytes
[ 4] 2.00-3.00 sec 12.5 MBytes 105 Mbits/sec 0 4.23 MBytes
[ 4] 3.00-4.00 sec 10.0 MBytes 83.9 Mbits/sec 50 2.96 MBytes
[ 4] 4.00-5.00 sec 11.2 MBytes 94.4 Mbits/sec 161 2.07 MBytes
[ 4] 5.00-6.00 sec 12.5 MBytes 105 Mbits/sec 0 2.10 MBytes
[ 4] 6.00-7.00 sec 10.0 MBytes 83.8 Mbits/sec 0 2.10 MBytes
[ 4] 7.00-8.00 sec 12.5 MBytes 105 Mbits/sec 0 2.10 MBytes
[ 4] 8.00-9.00 sec 12.5 MBytes 105 Mbits/sec 0 2.10 MBytes
[ 4] 9.00-10.00 sec 12.5 MBytes 105 Mbits/sec 0 2.10 MBytes
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
[ ID] Interval Transfer Bandwidth Retr
[ 4] 0.00-10.00 sec 111 MBytes 93.4 Mbits/sec 211 sender
[ 4] 0.00-10.00 sec 105 MBytes 87.9 Mbits/sec receiver
iperf Done.
~90mbps is also a nice result. Sure, nowhere near my maximum advertised throughput, but way beyond the rest of the networks in Asia. No doubt this is completely due to Google (together with several other companies) actually owning the cables and the network all the way from Singapore to US west cost (and many other places).