VM Instances: Create, Configure, Manage

This lesson covers the full lifecycle of a Compute Engine VM instance — from creation through configuration to ongoing management. Understanding these operations is essential for running production workloads on GCP.

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Creating VM Instances

Using the gcloud CLI

The most common way to create a VM programmatically is with the gcloud CLI:

gcloud compute instances create web-server-1 \
  --zone=europe-west2-a \
  --machine-type=e2-standard-4 \
  --image-family=ubuntu-2404-lts-amd64 \
  --image-project=ubuntu-os-cloud \
  --boot-disk-size=50GB \
  --boot-disk-type=pd-ssd \
  --tags=http-server,https-server \
  --metadata=startup-script='#!/bin/bash
apt-get update
apt-get install -y nginx'

Using Terraform

resource "google_compute_instance" "web_server" {
  name         = "web-server-1"
  machine_type = "e2-standard-4"
  zone         = "europe-west2-a"

  boot_disk {
    initialize_params {
      image = "ubuntu-os-cloud/ubuntu-2404-lts-amd64"
      size  = 50
      type  = "pd-ssd"
    }
  }

  network_interface {
    network = "default"
    access_config {}  # Ephemeral external IP
  }

  tags = ["http-server", "https-server"]
}

Using the Console

The Google Cloud Console provides a guided form where you select the zone, machine type, boot disk image, networking, and other options. The Console also shows an estimated monthly cost and can generate the equivalent gcloud or REST command.

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Configuring VM Instances

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