Chapter 7. Google Compute Engine

Virtual machines are a staple of modern public cloud offerings. Virtually every product and service running on public clouds leverages virtual machines. For many managed services, this fundamental layer is abstracted away from users, providing a simplified interface on which to build applications. These simplified interfaces generally carry with them inherent limitations on what users can and cannot do. Google Cloud offers Compute Engine for systems that cannot or should not operate within these limitations.

 

 

In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

• Understanding the fundamentals of Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)
• Creating and managing virtual machines on Google Cloud's infrastructure
• Understanding the various resources available to Compute Engine instances
• Creating custom images from existing Compute Engine instances
• Leveraging managed instance groups to create scalable solutions