Chapter 5 Lab difficulties with exercises 5.2-7. and 5.3-5.

rontiv

For 5.2-7. The instructions only say "..., download the JSON key file associated with it." for me it was not clear that the keys should be created first in order to download such "JSON key file"; so I lost some time looking for them before searching for clarification online and finally discovering that I have to create them.

For 5.3-5. "
I think the 'image' field in the main.tf file should be updated to a more recent image or family e.g.:
image = "debian-cloud/debian-11"

otherwise one might end up with an error like:

Error: Error resolving image name 'debian-cloud/debian-10': Could not find image or family debian-cloud/debian-10

Allow me to expand my account of the difficulties I had with these exercises in case it helps to improve the course.
Somehow after the first lab (Chapter3Lab) I ended up with 2 Google Cloud projects, I think I got one (automatically) by just pressing a button like "demo-project" and the one I manually created for the virtual machine "cp" for that lab. So when going over the "gcloud init" command I tried to select the manually created one with the virtual machine cp but the "JSON key file" that I manage to download had the name of the other project which was not the same I entered on the main.tf files; then I had no issues until I tried "terraform apply" and initially I got an error that was solved by enabling the "Compute Engine API" then I struggled with an error that said something like: "Error: Error loading zone 'us-central1-a': googleapi: Error 403:..." at that moment I got very confused because while trying to review the parameters on the Web browser for a while I was not able to list/view neither the service account I had created before nor the project I was trying to use on the main.tf file. Eventually it occurred to me that I should try to use the other project and when I did I still got the issue about the image field that I mentioned above and after fixing it, everything ran as expected. While doing my final reviews of the newly created images I was able again to list/view my service account and my other project on the Google Cloud console.