Creating instance templates

Instance templates define various characteristics of an instance and related attributes. Some of these attributes are:

• Machine type (f1-micro, n1-standard-1, custom)
• Image (we created one in the previous tip, app-image)
• Zone (us-west1-a)
• Tags (we have a firewall rule for tag http)

How to do it…

Once a template is created, we can use it to create a managed instance group which can be auto-scale based on various parameters. Instance templates are typically available globally as long as we do not specify a restrictive parameter like a specific subnet or disk:

- name: create instance template named app-template
  gce_instance_template:
    name: app-template
    size: f1-micro
    tags: http,http-server
    image: app-image
    state: present
    subnetwork: public-subnet
    subnetwork_region: us-west1
    service_account_email: "{{ service_account_email }}"
    credentials_file: "{{ credentials_file }}"
    project_id: "{{ project_id }}"
  tags:
  - recipe9

We have specified...