Creating instance backups

Backing up is an important part of any enterprise's business continuity and disaster recovery process. Almost every instance running in an organization is backed up at some frequency that is demanded by the business needs. There are some components of the IT ecosystem that are backed up more often than others. Backing up data lies at a very important level in the spectrum and hence hard disks, data in tables, and configuration data are saved in multiple ways.

In this recipe, we'll simulate a disaster scenario of a Linux instance failing and how we can bring up the machine from its last saved backup. One of the simplest ways to back up a disk on the GCP is by using snapshots. Snapshots take a copy of the disk at a point in time and are efficiently designed to back up data continuously (at requested intervals) via incremental snapshots. Incremental snapshots do not back up the entire disk, but only the data that has changed since the last backup. GCP also offers an...