GCP Environment

The user account provisioned through the Katacoda environment will have access to an isolated project per user, defined under O’Reilly’s organization. Note that the temporary user account is active for 60 minutes and is then deactivated. Please see the GCP Sandbox example (through direct link only) on learning.oreilly.com.

Lab Set-up

Base imageID to configure in index.json: "imageid": "orm-gcp"
index.json should be configured to auto-execute the set-env.sh script.

  "intro": {
      "text": "intro.md",
      "courseData": "background.sh",
      "code": "set-env.sh"
  },

The set-env.sh script should include:

  chmod +x /opt/get-gcp
  for i in {1..20}; do /opt/get-gcp && . ~/.gcpenv && break || sleep 1; done

The user is assigned a combination of roles (roles/editor, roles/iam.serviceAccountAdmin, roles/resourcemanager.projectIamAdmin, roles/datastore.owner, and roles/servicenetworking.networksAdmin) for their associated project. These roles are necessary for the user to create and manage resources in the project, but prevent the user from creating or modifying resources outside of the project.

Pre-Installed Tools

gcloud CLI is pre-installed in the base image.
- Components:
- gke-gcloud-auth-plugin
- kubectl
- alpha
- beta
- cbt
- bigtable
Terraform

Environment Variables

The environment includes GCP credentials in the file ~/.gcp-resp, and there is a helper script /opt/get-gcp that configures the following environment variables:

console_url: URL containing project ID to sign in to a GCP account as a user
email: GCP user email
password: GCP user password
project_name: GCP project name
GOOGLE_APPLICATION_CREDENTIALS: path to the service account key file
GOOGLE_CLOUD_PROJECT: GCP project ID
USER: GCP project name
randomNum / sessionRandomNumber: a random string of 12 decimal digits. Useful for resources that need to be globally unique.

Services

For full service details on Supported Services, Quotas, and Limitations, please refer to the GCP Service Details page.