What is it?

Google deployment manager allows you to define your google cloud infrastructure as yaml configuration.

It’s similar to terraform and aws cloudformation.

Ok, let’s get going!

Not so fast, zergling. Make sure you’ve set up a google cloud project (https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/projects) and the gcloud command line tool to interact with it (https://cloud.google.com/sdk/gcloud/.)

And now?

Now, we get to play. At it’s very simplest, deployment manager (from herein referred to as DM,) takes one config (yaml) file as input, and creates infrastructure based on the content of the config file. For example - vm.yml can be used to create a new vm:

# NB: Alter MYPROJECT to the name of your project
resources:
- name: my-vm
  type: compute.v1.instance
  properties:
    zone: us-central1-a
    machineType: https://www.googleapis.com/compute/v1/projects/MYPROJECT/zones/us-central1-f/machineTypes/f1-micro
    disks:
    - deviceName: boot
      type: PERSISTENT
      boot: true
      autoDelete: true
      initializeParams:
        sourceImage: https://www.googleapis.com/compute/v1/projects/debian-cloud/global/images/family/debian-8
    networkInterfaces:
    - network: https://www.googleapis.com/compute/v1/projects/MYPROJECT/global/networks/default
      accessConfigs:
      - name: External NAT
        type: ONE_TO_ONE_NAT

Resources will have a name, and a type. Depending on what their type is, they may require additional properties to be configured too. You can learn more about what the different types are in the documentation.

Yes, but nothing got created yet, right?

Right - a perfectly astute if impatient remark. To create a deployment:

gcloud deployment-manager deployments create DEPLOYMENT_NAME --config vm.yml