Does permanent external IP require some special agreement? (Alpha Access permission)

[Pat S]

I've setup a GCP Compute Engine/VM for my personal use and wanted to make it permanently available via a DNS entry I manage.
I searched and found and followed the steps listed here.   https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/ip-addresses/reserve-static-external-ip-address#IP_assign

They basically say:
(1) Edit the VM
(2) Goto network interface, and select use an external IP address and save.
(OK, a little more to it but that's the simple version).

Saving worked and when I started the VM, I got an error:
Edit VM instance "my-vm"
Required 'Alpha Access' permission for 'Compute API'

So I looked up that error and found.   https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/gce-discussion/hdcuQqdPHXo
Which says ...
Alpha products are usually not available to the general public as they are in an early testing phase and usually require specific agreements with Google, for testing specific features, and are often directly supported by the engineering team building the feature. I say "usually" because there are sometimes a few features made available publicly in Alpha.

Others say I need to white list something, but I'm not sure how to do that.

Before I try to spend time figuring this out, I wanted to know if there is simple way to give my instance a permanent IP address (one region is fine) no load balancer or fancy stuff needed.

Please let me know if:
(1) there is an easier way to do this.
(2) The steps I followed should work without an Alpha Access agreement.

Thanks,
PatS

[Carlos (Cloud Platform Support)]

Hi Pat, 

I got the same error and I will report it. It seems this is just happening if you try to create the static IP on the edition page of the VM. 

 

Here are some workarounds that worked for me:

1) Create a new VM.
2) Go to Cloud Console -> Compute Engine and check which external IP is using.
3) Go to Cloud Console -> VPC network -> External IP
4) Look for the External IP and change it to static. 

You could also try this sequence

1) Create the Static IP. Cloud Console VPC network -> External IP -> Reserve External IP
2) Spin the VM
         a) Cloud Console -> Compute Engine -> VM instance -> Create Instance
         b) Click on “Management, disk, networking, SSH keys”
         c) Click on “Networking” and Edit the interface
         d) Choose the created IP and spin the VM