gocloud

README

Some tools to help use Google Cloud compute nodes.

• Run sessionender as part of launching a new node that you intend to use interactively. It shuts the node down when the login tty has been idle for more than a configurable value (default is 15 minutes) to save money.

• makecloudconfig assembles a single cloudconfig file for a GCP COS node out of a list of services. This makes it easy to pack a number of Docker containers into a single node. Presumably I could have used Kubernetes or docker compose or something similar to do this but this was easy, predictable and cheap.

• gocloud tool to launch a GCP node without using gcloud. Smaller and faster than using gcloud but does so much less. How to use:

  • make a configuration file in TOML: Tom's Obvious Minimal Language toml format

    defaultzone = "us-east1-b"
    projectid = "liquiorg"
    
    [instance.smallnodisk]
    	hardware = "e2-small"
    	family = "cos-cloud"
    	userdatafile = "path to your couldconfig file name"
    	githost = "Git repository to checkout for system setup"
    	postsshconfig = "Script to run on node bringup"
    

  • Make one:

    gocloud make smallnodisk myinstance
    

  • I have some related tooling to provision the node. A bare node needs a useful cloudconfig file, a configured service account, etc.

  • I use the mkconfig tool to setup a node from within the cloudconfig file.

  • On MacOS, gocloud wants to read selected configuration that it will push to the GCP metadata service from the MacOS KeyChain. The gocloud show-meta subcommand will show if this is configured correctly.