Instance Templates & Groups

Instance templates and instance groups are foundational building blocks for scalable, resilient architectures on Compute Engine. Instance templates define a VM configuration that can be reused, while instance groups manage collections of VM instances as a single unit.

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Instance Templates

An instance template is a resource that defines the properties of a VM instance — machine type, boot disk image, network configuration, labels, metadata, service account, and more. Templates are immutable — once created, they cannot be modified. To change a configuration, you create a new template.

Creating an Instance Template

gcloud compute instance-templates create web-template-v1 \
  --machine-type=e2-standard-2 \
  --image-family=debian-12 \
  --image-project=debian-cloud \
  --boot-disk-size=20GB \
  --boot-disk-type=pd-balanced \
  --tags=http-server,https-server \
  --metadata=startup-script='#!/bin/bash
apt-get update && apt-get install -y nginx' \
  --service-account=web-sa@my-project.iam.gserviceaccount.com \
  --scopes=cloud-platform \
  --labels=app=web,env=production

Key Properties of Instance Templates