Guidelines for Planning, Deploying, and Managing Virtual Machines

Consider the following guidelines to help with streamlining your work with VMs. These guidelines apply to working with a small number of VMs. Later chapters will provide additional guidelines for working with clusters and instance groups, which are sets of similarly configured VMs.

• Choose a machine type with the fewest CPUs and the smallest amount of memory that still meets your requirements, including peak capacity. This will minimize the cost of the VM.
• Use the console for ad hoc administration of VMs. Use scripts with gcloud commands for tasks that will be repeated.
• Use startup scripts to perform software updates and other tasks that should be performed on startup.
• If you make many modifications to a machine image, consider saving it and using it with new instances rather than running the same set of modifications on every new instance.
• If you can tolerate unplanned disruptions, use preemptible VMs to reduce cost...