[colug-432] Google Cloud Compute API

[Rick Hornsby]

I’m trying to figure out the Google Cloud API, specifically the Python
library.

I have a shell script that works using `gcloud compute …` commands, but
I’ve been asked to add some functionality. At this point, I’m going to move
it to Python for the additional structure/objects/data types etc. (My
options are shell or Python.)

With the `gcloud` shell command, specifying a zone is optional. This works
great for the shell script. I don’t care about the zone, I just need to
iterate over all the instances in a project. However, it seems that with
the library/API approach, zone is _not_ optional[1]. This would leave me
with the very bad position of having to get a list of all zones (that’s
doable), iterating over each zone looking for instances.

The python API so far looks to me like a bit of a second class pile of
nonsense that probably (very) loosely wraps around something else. For
example, you have to create the resource type objects from two strings,
like so:

crm = googleapiclient.discovery.build('cloudresourcemanager', ‘v1')
compute = googleapiclient.discovery.build('compute', ‘v1’)

Get the list of projects?

projects = crm.projects().list().execute()['projects']

Get the project’s instances?

compute.instances().list(project=‘projectid',
zone='us-central1-?').execute()

Am I missing something, especially w/r/t the zone is optional vs required
depending on your gcloud vs python lib? Is there a better Python library
than the one that Google provides?

Thanks!

[1] https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/reference/rest/beta/instances/list
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