To ensure your SSH public key is available on every VM in a project with minimal effort, what should you do?

Uploading your public SSH key to the project metadata ensures it's automatically available to all new and existing VMs within that project. This is the most efficient method for project-wide key distribution. Uploading to each instance's metadata is tedious and doesn't scale. Creating a custom image with the key embedded is less flexible, as it requires creating new images for key updates and doesn't affect existing instances. While gcloud compute ssh can copy a key, it's a per-instance operation and doesn't persist the key across reboots or new instances, nor does it make the key globally available to the project.