Google Compute Engine - Introduction

What is Google Cloud Compute Engine?

From Wikipedia: Google Compute Engine is the Infrastructure as a Service component of Google Cloud Platform which is built on the global infrastructure that runs Google's search engine, Gmail, YouTube and other services. Google Compute Engine enables users to launch virtual machines on demand.

In simpler terms, GCE is a service that allows you to run a Linux machine elsewhere (which in this case is a Google managed server). This is useful for a couple of reasons:

1. Scaleable - you don’t have to sell existing hardware, buy more or manually update anything
2. Lower entry cost - you don’t need to buy an entire computer
3. Extensible - easy to upgrade/downgrade your VM
4. Backups - usually automated
5. Security
6. Stable - GCP has a guaranteed uptime of 99.95%

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Table of contents

• Setup
• Connecting to your instance
• Deploying Python - Werkzeug and gunicorn
• Deploying Python - nginx
• Deploying Python - Custom Domains and TLS