GCP Compute Engine

Deploy, manage, and scale Compute Engine virtual machines on Google Cloud Platform.

When to Use

• Deploying web servers, application backends, or batch-processing workloads on GCP
• Running workloads that need full OS-level control (unlike Cloud Run or App Engine)
• Creating managed instance groups for auto-healing and auto-scaling behind a load balancer
• Provisioning GPU-attached VMs for ML training or rendering pipelines
• Cost-optimizing non-critical workloads with preemptible or spot VMs

Prerequisites

• Google Cloud SDK (gcloud) installed and authenticated
• A GCP project with the Compute Engine API enabled
• IAM role roles/compute.admin or scoped roles for instance management