In this exercise, we will instantiate a virtual machine using the gcloud compute engine. This may not be as straightforward as you expect. The reason for this is that there are many aspects to consider. For example, in what datacenter do we want our instance to reside. Do we want a public IP address assigned to it? Looking at the gcloud compute instances create command, it may first appear intimidating. Let's take it step-by-step and discover what we need to create a VM. With each step, make sure to write down the parameters that you'll need later.

Google Cloud offers a number of services, none of which are enabled by default. One of them is the compute service (i.e.: compute.googleapis.com) that lets us create VM instances. When running a command that requires a certain service that was not previously enabled, you get a prompt asking you if you want to enable it then and there. In this case, we'll do it manually. Note that this may take a bit of time, up to a couple of minutes.

# get full list of available services
$ gcloud services list --available
 
# enable the compute service
$ gcloud services enable compute.googleapis.com

First thing first. What OS do we want to run on our machine? A Windows server? Maybe CentOS? Nay – let's look for something familiar: Ubuntu.

# list available base VM images
$ gcloud compute images list

All cloud providers worth their salt will offer you a number of physical locations (datacenters) where to deploy your instance. Locality is very important when offering web services. Normally, this is a difficult task. Can you imagine YouTube running on a single server somewhere in the US and you accessing it from SEA? Many people use Content Delivery Networks (CDN) for this task. Even DigitalOcean, a rather important cloud provider uses CloudFlare as a proxy for their HTTP servers.

You can read up on Google's regions and zones. When working with your own funds and not with free tier accounts or education credits, you will want to consult their regional pricing model. Usually, US-based datacenters are much cheaper.

# select a region and zone
$ gcloud compute zones list

When selecting the number of Virtual CPUs (vCPU) and RAM for your VM, you will have to choose from a list of presets. These presets may vary depending on the region.

# show available flavors for your selected zone
$ gcloud compute machine-types list --zones "${YOUR_ZONE}"