Using Terraform to Launch a Compute Engine Instance in GCP

From Google Cloud navigation, choose Compute Engine > VM instances.

Click SSH next to terraform-instance.

Use root privileges:

sudo -i

Change into the root directory:

cd /

Call Terraform:

terraform

Allow the SDK to communicate with GCP:

gcloud init --console-only

Enter Y and Yat the prompt.

Choose your Cloud Project.

Select the Cloud Student account.

Choose Y to configure a default Compute Region and Zone

Choose "us-central1-c"

Copy the code provided.

Paste the code into the terminal.

Create the service account key:

gcloud iam service-accounts keys create /downloads/compute-instance.json --iam-account <SERVICE_ACCOUNT_EMAIL>

Create a main.tf file:

vim main.tf

Paste the following configuration, replacing <PROJECT_NAME> with your project name (found in the top navigation bar of the Google Cloud console):

provider "google" {
  version = "3.5.0"
  credentials = file("/downloads/compute-instance.json")
  project = "<PROJECT_NAME>"
  region  = "us-central1"
  zone    = "us-central1-c"
}

resource "google_compute_network" "vpc_network" {
  name = "terraform-network"
}
resource "google_compute_instance" "vm_instance" {
  name         = "terraform-instance2"
  machine_type = "f1-micro"
  zone         = "us-central1-c"
  boot_disk {
    initialize_params {
      image = "centos-cloud/centos-7"
    }
  }

  network_interface {
    network = google_compute_network.vpc_network.name
    access_config {
    }
  }
}

Save and exit the file by pressing Escape followed by :wq.

Finish up by running terraform init, terraform validate, terraform plan, and terraform apply.