[EN] Basic Setup Instance Compute Engine on Google CLoud Platform

Holla, this time I will try to document a little about the basics of creating instances on GCP.

Introduction

Actually, what is the GCP Compute Engine?

Compute Engine is a customizable computing service that allows you to create and run virtual machines on Google infrastructure.

You can create a Virtual Machine (VM) to suit your needs. A predefined machine type is a pre-built, ready-to-use VM configuration with a specific number of vCPUs and memory to quickly start running applications.

With Custom Machine Types, you can create virtual machines with the optimal amount of CPU and memory for your workload.

This allows you to adapt your infrastructure to your workload. If requirements change, using the stop/start feature you can move your workload to a smaller or larger Custom Machine Type instance, or to a predefined configuration.

How does it work?

You can create a VM instance using a boot disk image, a boot disk snapshot, or a container image. The image can be a public operating system (OS) image or a custom one. Depending on where your users are you can define the zone you want the virtual machine to be created in. By default all traffic from the internet is blocked by the firewall and you can enable the HTTP(s) traffic if needed.

Use snapshot schedules (hourly, daily, or weekly) as a best practice to back up your Compute Engine workloads. Compute Engine offers live migration by default to keep your virtual machine instances running even when software or hardware update occurs. Your running instances are migrated to another host in the same zone instead of requiring your VMs to be rebooted.

Use case

There are many use cases Compute Engine can serve in addition to running websites and databases. You can also migrate your existing systems onto Google Cloud, with Migrate for Compute Engine, enabling you to run stateful workloads in the cloud within minutes rather than days or weeks. Windows, Oracle or VMware applications have solution sets enabling a smooth transition to Google Cloud. To run windows applications either bring your own license leveraging Sole-tenant nodes or using the included licenced images.

Let’s start…

First, prepare your GCP account…

Then go to Compute Engine, don’t forget to turn on the Compute API first

Next select Create Instance and give it a name

Here I choose the type of machine with the lowest price and with the following specifications:

a. Region: us-central1-c
b. Type: e2-micro
c. OS: Ubuntu 22.04 LTS
d. Disk: 25 GB

Where the price per hour is calculated at $0.01 for each instance that is run, if it is not run then billing will not count the VMs that we create (pay as you go).

And finally, adjust the IP address and Firewall to your needs, here I only need HTTPS traffic.

Then select Create, wait until the instances are ready.

Done, the instances are ready to be filled with application or web services.

Conclusion

This Compute Engine can actually help us in any way, especially in infrastructure needs, both small to large scale, and it is easy for current virtualization technology to be developed and collaborated with other technologies such as AI and ML.

Source : https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/instances?hl=id