Compute Engine
Compute Engine is a service that provides VMs that run on GCP. We usually refer to a running VM as an instance. When you use Compute Engine, you create and manage one or more instances.
Virtual Machine Images
Instances run images, which contain operating systems, libraries, and other code. You may choose to run a public image provided by Google (Figure 4.1). Both Linux and Windows images are available. In addition to the images maintained by Google, there are other public images provided by open source projects or third-party vendors.
FIGURE 4.1 A subset of operating system images available in Compute Engine
The public images include a range of operating systems, such as CentOS, Container Optimized OS from Google, Debian, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, SUSE Enterprise Linux Server, Ubuntu, and Windows Server.
If there is no public image that meets your needs, you can create a custom image from a boot disk or by starting with another image. To create a VM from the console...
