Google Cloud Platform

Introducing Compute Engine

Google Compute Engine (GCE) is the component of the Google Cloud Platform that allows you to launch virtual machines (VMs) on demand. The user can start a virtual machine from a preconfigured standard image (CentOS, Debian, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Microsoft Windows Server) or create their own image.

An image is a persistent disk with everything you need to start an instance (operating system, root file system, etc.). Google Compute Engine installs the image-defined root file system by default.

Let’s go to the Google Cloud Platform console and click on Compute Engine:

GCS-VM-3

Compute Engine offers two ways to create a virtual machine instance:

GCS-VM-4

  1. VM instances (from the left menu) allow access to virtual machine instances creation.
  2. Preconfigured instances or from scratch, Create Instance give all the tools to create and configure a virtual machine.
  3. This option permits the import of an external virtual machine (supported sources include on-premises VMware, Amazon EC2 and Microsoft Azure.).