Google Compute Engine

The Google Compute Engine service lets you create and run virtual machine instances on GCP. Just like any other cloud provider, Google lets you deploy and manage virtual machine instances in a true Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) fashion. Google Compute Engine also supports a variety of operating systems including Windows Server 2008 R2, 2012 R2 and 2016, Red Hat, Ubuntu, SUSE, CentOS, CoreOS, and Debian. You can even import a disk image from your on-premises environment. Each instance is part of a project and contains a small persistent root disk and more storage can be added depending on your requirements. A virtual private cloud (VPC) network can also be attached to an instance with an assigned IP address. We will discuss storage and networking requirements more later in this chapter.