Building Google Cloud Platform Solutions

Boot disks

The most prevalent type of persistent disk is the boot disk present in every Compute Engine instance. When creating a new instance, developers specify the type (standard or SSD) and size of the disk, as well as the VM image to load onto the disk.

Whereas other persistent disks may be attached and detached from running instances, the boot disk is tied to an instance throughout the instance's life. By default, when a VM is destroyed, its boot disk is also destroyed. This behavior can be disabled using the gcloud compute instances set-disk-auto-delete command. For example, to disable auto-delete of the hello-gce VM we created earlier, use the following command:

gcloud compute instances set-disk-auto-delete \ --zone=us-east1-c hello-gce ...