Automatic VM Creation

Requirements

Dependency	Version
python	3.9.13
gcloud	2022.02.11
az	2.45.0

Installation

pip install -r requirements.txt

Running

Pre Run

In order to run the example automate.py, you need to be logged into Google Cloud Platform via the gcloud CLI:

gcloud auth application-default login

You must have a quota project tied to your account:

gcloud auth application-default set-quota-project $PROJECT_ID

And the current account that you're logged into must have the correct permissions for the tasks you want to do on the Google Compute Engine.

You must also log in to the Microsoft Azure via the az CLI:

az login

Run

Finally, you can run automate.py with:

python automate.py

Configuration

Google Cloud Platform

The project key must be a project that has a billing account tied to it and has the Google Compute Engine API enabled.

Base Requirements

key	required	example
name	Yes	linuxserver01
project	No	vm-creation-poc-379200
team	No	Toronto Office Web Team
purpose	No	webserver
os	No	linux
image	Yes	debian-10-buster-v20230206
imageproject	Yes	debian-cloud
zone	Yes	northamerica-northeast2-a

Extras

key	required	example
ports	No	80, 443, 3333
description	No	Linux is the best!

Microsoft Azure

The resource-group must have a subscription tied to it.

Base Requirements

key	required	example
purpose	No	webserver
os	No	linux
name	Yes	linuxserver01
resource-group	Yes	images
team	No	Toronto Office Web Team
image	Yes	Debian
location	Yes	canadacentral
admin-username	Yes	azureuser

Extras

key	required	example
ports	No	80, 443, 3333

Project Structure

The user is only required to know how to format key values in the configuration and how they want to compose their virtual machines (only from a configuration file for now).

APIs and Abstractions

The code is structured so that new APIs can be added easily. If one was to add AWS to the list of APIs for automatic VM creation, it would be as easy as implementing abstractions for AWS (in classes/abstractions/), and adding the new implemented abstractions to automate.py.

Logger

Because it is a requirement to log some output before creating VMs, I implemented a beefed up logger so that I can customize the logs that I'm outputting. This greatly helped me during my debugging so I could know which logs are coming from where, when they are coming and the amount that I should be paying attention to them.

VMDocumenter

It's also a requirement that the VMs that get created are documented. It's for this reason that I created the VMDocumenter class to reduce the amount of duplication between composers.

Report

A report on VM creation for the various cloud platforms can be found in docs/Automatic Virtual Machine Creation Report.pdf.