Running the agent on GCP

Deploy a self-hosted Airplane agent on GCP.

The Airplane agent can be deployed to GCP through running containers on VMs. The following instructions provide a quick way to create an instance group from the command line.

Support for deploying to GCP via Terraform is coming soon. If you'd like to use Terraform, please let us know!

To follow the installation instructions below, you'll need the following values:

  • YOUR_API_TOKEN: generate a new token by running airplane apikeys create <token name> from the Airplane CLI.
  • YOUR_TEAM_ID: get your team ID via airplane auth info or visit the Team Settings page.

Creating a managed instance group

To install the agent on GCP, we'll be creating managed instance groups running the Airplane agent Docker image: us-docker.pkg.dev/airplane-prod/public/agent:1. (See the GCP docs for additional details on deploying the container and rolling out updates.)

First, create an instance template defining the instance properties. Note that you'll need to give the template a unique name (e.g. airplane-agent-SOME_NUMBER) and fill in YOUR_API_TOKEN and YOUR_TEAM_ID.

bash
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gcloud compute instance-templates create-with-container airplane-agent-0 \
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  --container-image us-docker.pkg.dev/airplane-prod/public/agent:1 \
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  --container-privileged \
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  --container-env \
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    AP_API_TOKEN=YOUR_API_TOKEN,AP_TEAM_ID=YOUR_TEAM_ID,AP_LABELS="cloud:gcp" \
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  --container-mount-host-path \
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    mount-path=/var/run/docker.sock,host-path=/var/run/docker.sock,mode=rw \
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  --boot-disk-size 256GB

Setting the AP_LABELS environment variable will add the provided labels to the agent for use in run constraints. For details on using labels, see Execute rules & constraints.

Next, create an instance group with that template:

bash
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gcloud compute instance-groups managed create airplane-agents \
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  --base-instance-name airplane-agent \
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  --size 2 \
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  --template airplane-agent-0

That's it! You can visit your Instance groups to see the new group start launching instances.

After a few minutes, you should be able to see the new agents appear at https://app.airplane.dev/agents.

Updating a managed instance group

To pull in the latest version of the agent image, you simply need to recycle the instances by performing a rolling replace.

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gcloud compute instance-groups managed rolling-action replace airplane-agents

If you need to update the instance template, create a new one (e.g. airplane-agent-1):

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gcloud compute instance-templates create-with-container airplane-agent-1 \
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  # Your other settings here

And update using the Instance Group updater:

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gcloud compute instance-groups managed rolling-action \
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  start-update airplane-agents \
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  --version=template=airplane-agent-1
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