Steps To Launch Virtual Machines

Step 1: Goto GCP Cloud Console

Step 2: Create a project

If you haven’t created a GCP account or a project in GCP, you can refer to this article.

Step 3: Navigate to Compute Engine -> VM Instances

• To do this, you can click the menu option in the top left and navigate to VM Instances as shown in the below image.

Step 4: Enable Compute Engine API if not done already

• To enable the API, the GCP asks for a billing account. Make sure to set up the billing account.

Step 5: Create a new instance

• The instance is the Virtual Machine instance that we need to launch.
• Click on the CREATE INSTANCE button on the top right and fill in all the required parameters for your project.
• The parameters include the name of your instance, the preferred region and zone of the instance, CPU and memory type, preferred OS, size of disk etc.

• After filling in the parameters, click on the CREATE button. It will take a few minutes to create your VM instance.

Step 6: Connect to the VM instance

• Once the instance is created, you can view it on the VM instances page. Click on the SSH button to connect to your machine through the command line.

Step 7: (Optional) Connect to VM instance from local computer.

• You can also connect to a VM instance from your local computer. Open the terminal and enter the below ssh command.

ssh YOUR_USERNAME@VM_EXTERNAL_IP

You can get the username and VM_EXTERNAL_IP from the GCP console.

Google Compute Engine (GCE) is one of the cloud services offered by Google Cloud Platform (GCP). GCE provides Infrastructure as a service (IaaS) which allows users to create and manage Virtual Machines on Google’s infrastructure. Users can launch their custom OS images using a VM. GCE follows a pay-per-use model which allows users to pay only for the usage.