Accessing the virtual machine

After a few minutes, the virtual machine is ready and running:

From the instances screen, we can get the following information:

1. A green check is confirming that the VM instance is running.
2. The VM instance name.
3. The location (zone) of the VM.
4. The external IP address (the address with which the VM instance is reachable from the Internet).
5. The SSH (Secure Shell) connection to the VM instance.

One of the simplest and secure ways to access the VM instance is via an SSH connection. When clicking on the SSH button (identified by number 5 in the previous image), a terminal window opens and, after a few seconds, the prompt appears waiting for a command:

What we see here is a full-functional virtual machine running a Debian operating system. From this terminal window, we can run commands, install applications and so on.

Now we should run the following commands:

• sudo apt update: Updates the list of available packages and their versions, which allows us to know if packages require updating.
• sudo apt upgrade: Upgrades the packages included in the list generated by the previous command, respecting the software configuration when possible.

In the last line, the command informs six packages to upgrade, so we run the following command (sudo apt upgrade) to upgrade them: