This document provides instructions for using Ansible to manage Google Compute Engine (GCE) instances. It outlines the steps to set up GCE instances, generate service account keys, configure Ansible inventory files to connect to GCE, and run playbooks to manage hosts on GCE. Additional resources are also referenced for more details on integrating Ansible with GCE, managing SSH keys, service accounts, and the demo GitHub repository.

1. Esther Lozano | @esloho

2. Set up the place: GCE
- Create project and add instances in Google Cloud Engine
- Check the first steps tutorial for VM instances
- Add ssh public key to project
- Compute engine → Metadata → SSH keys
- Test ssh connection from your local
- Create service key and download it (i.e. ansible_service_account.json)
- IAM & admin → Service account → Create key
- Place it into your ansible project
- Install gcloud in your local machine (optional)

6. Manage invitations: Ansible
- Copy from contrib/inventory files gce.ini and gce.py into your inventory
- Download from https://github.com/ansible/ansible
- Create secrets.py
- Use absolute path or relative to playbook execution for ansible_service_account.json
- Indicate absolute path of secrets.py in gce.ini
- pip install apache-libcloud
- Test the gce connection
- $ inventory/gce.py --list
- $ ansible all -u esloho -i inventory/gce.py -m ping

8. Party!
- Run your playbooks as usual
- $ ansible-playbook -i inventory monitoring.yml
- Select hosts by network tag from your gce instances
- hosts: tag_mongo
- hosts: all:!tag_http_server
- Host configuration (host_vars, --limit, hosts…) by instance name
- Possible to combine static inventory and dynamic gce.py

11. Some party favors
- Ansible documentation for GCE
http://docs.ansible.com/ansible/latest/guide_gce.html
- Managing SSH keys in GCE
https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/instances/adding-removing-ssh-keys
- Service account keys and permissions
https://cloud.google.com/iam/docs/service-accounts
- Github repository of this demo https://github.com/esloho/ansible-gce-demo