Provisioning in the Google Cloud platform

By now, you should be seeing the similarities between using Chef with Amazon and Microsoft, and as you might expect, the similarities don't end there. As you are about to see, we are going to do much the same as we explore provisioning and managing systems hosted on the Google Cloud Platform in the Google Compute Engine (GCE). One of the biggest advantages that Google's Engine offers is speed of deployment, so if you need to stand up images quickly, this might be the hosting platform for you. The Google Cloud Platform is feature-rich and offers automation for many of the services under the platform umbrella. Unfortunately, not all of the automation features are available using the associated Knife plugin. Still, there is plenty we can do, so let's explore what Chef provisioning options are available with the GCE and the knife-google plugin.

Installing and configuring the knife-google plugin

We are going to install the knife-google plugin to allow...