Chapter 4: Working with Google Compute Engine

Google Compute Engine (GCE) is one of the fundamental services inside Google Cloud Platform (GCP). While the public cloud continues to move on from traditional Virtual Machines (VMs), there are still use cases for these machines and, just like other vendors, GCE allows us to create and run VMs on GCP. Google refers to a VM in GCP as a Compute Engine instance. Compute Engine makes it easy to find the VM to match our requirements, whether it is a small-sized VM or a large data-processing VM.

GCE is a purely Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) solution; therefore, you will need to manage and scale your VM as necessary, but this makes it an ideal solution for lift and shift migration from on-premises into the public cloud. You can use your own customized OS as you do within your own data center or you can use some predefined Google, Windows, or Linux images. You can also bring your own license for Windows, but this comes with some considerations...