Preparing a cloud image

General things to consider

• Start with a disk that is large enough to build the image - e.g. 15GB
  • On GCP, a 10GB image was not large enough to build QM 20.3.1 (it worked after removing temporary files)
  • After cleaning, QM 20.3.1 occupied 6.1GB disk space on GCP; i.e. a default size of 15GB is probably also fine for new users (but GCP allows to change the disk size when creating a VM from the image)
• Choose at least 2 CPUs with 4GB of RAM
  • Your configuration may also be the standard configuration shown to users creating a VM using your image (to figure out?)
  • You won't need it for long, so price for CPU/RAM is of no concern

GCP

• Create new SSH keypair. Edit the user@server bit at the end of the public key to user "ubuntu" (GCP detects this user and adds the SSH public key for this user in the VM)
• Create new VM
  • add public key
• provision via ansible (note: it seems the IP does not change even if you stop the VM and start it again)
• remove SSH key added by ansible (or perhaps change ansible roles so that it no longer does this...)
• Create "Image"
  • Note: GCP distinguishes between "Machine images" (private) and "Images" (can be public). You want the second option.
  • put family "quantum-mobile"

Pricing

• Image pricing (for us to host it): 8.5c/GB/month (GCP)
• Disk pricing (for users): 4c/GB/month (GCP)