So my fiancee Jordana spent a few weeks building these really nice boxes for her bridesmaids and I was wondering to myself.. how should I ask my groomsmen? A few things crossed my mind then I thought that it would be fun to have them go through a series of technical challenges in order to achieve this honor. 🙂 Only problem was I couldn’t make it too hard or I would be guiding them through the whole thing. So I decided they would need to do something with the cloud and I would build a small application called ‘helpmike’ to ask them.

To setup the app I followed the compute engine javascript client library example and put together a small app with oauth and the ability to insert a disk, insert an instance, and list instances. I decided not to take them through the whole vm build process to minimize delays. So they would just auth to the app and run the list instance function, locate the external IP, visit the IP in a browser and they would be presented with a form asking them if they would be my groomsman. It turns out more than half of them got through this without a problem.

So to setup the env, first launched a LAMP instance from Cloud Launcher. I then created a small form on Google Forms. I wanted to keep this pretty basic so I took the embed code from the form send screen and modified the default apache page on my Bitnami LAMP instance. I added each of my groomsmen gmail addresses to IAM so they could access the app. Wrote a bit of instructions in the notification email and on the app and that was it.

Here’s how it turned out: