Creating FreeBSD images in Google Compute

I found various instructions to create a FreeBSD image in Google Compute but non of those instructions where complete of functional.  Here are the correct instructions.

• Install the cloud SDK
• There are instructions here.
• I use OS X and Homebrew so I just ran the following instead.
• brew tap caskroom/cask
• brew cask install google-cloud-sdk
• Then run the following commands to setup and log in.
• gcloud init
• gcloud auth list
• List the versions available
• Run this to list all the releases available You can delete the last grep to see betas and release candidates as well.
• gcloud compute images list --project freebsd-org-cloud-dev --no-standard-images | grep -i freebsd- | grep -release
• Now to create a new instance
• Update the following command as needed and run it.
• gcloud compute instances create "InstanceName" --machine-type "g1-small" --network "default" --subnet "default" --maintenance-policy "MIGRATE" --image "freebsd-11-1-release-amd64" --image-project=freebsd-org-cloud-dev --boot-disk-size "30" --boot-disk-type "pd-standard"
• InstanceName should be changed to a useful host name.
• --machine-type can just be g1-small for now, or another option from tis list.
• gcloud compute machine-types list
• gcloud compute machine-types lis
t
• --network and --subnet will probably need to be changed to your custom network. You can list the available options with these commands.
• gcloud compute networks list
• gcloud compute networks subnets list
• --image can be changed another version from the earlier list.
• --boot-disk-size should be at least 30GB. You can add additional drives later.
• --boot-disk-type can be pd-standard or pd-ssd depending if you want SSD or not.
• This should create and power on the VM and you will now be able to see it in the website and make adjustments to the configuration as needed.
• To gain SSH access to this server you will need to do the following steps.
• Ensure you can ping the servers internal or external IP address.
• Optionally go into the Google Cloud -> VPC network -> Firewall rules and add a rule for tcp:22 traffic route to the network or server.
• Create a public key and load it onto the server. This step is required and was one of my major hurdles.
• Check that you have a public key on the computer to authenticate
• cat ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub
• If you don't have this file its empty runt he following to create one.
• ssh-keygen -t rsa -f ~/.ssh/id_rsa
• Add this public key to the instances you can access it.
• gcloud compute instances add-metadata InstanceName --metadata-from-file sshKeys=~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub
• Or you can add it to the entire project.
• gcloud compute project-info add-metadata --metadata-from-file sshKeys=~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub
• Now you will be able to login with the following.
• gcloud compute ssh freebsd-recovery

If you get errors like Operation timed out they would indicate  issues with your networking, firewall rules, or ip address configuration.  If you get a Permission denied (publickey) error instead it means the public key was not loaded properly form the ~/.ssh/id_rsa file. You can also open the file in a text editor and manually enter it in the VM instance under Custom metadata with a key of sshKeys.

Note that this authentication is per device, but once you authenticate you can enable password login the ssh config and add other users if you want.