Building Google Cloud Platform Solutions

Managed instance group (MIG)

Maintaining virtual machines on an individual basis is an approach that does not scale from an operations point of view. This creates the need for tools and methods to manage VMs with a broader stroke. For Google Cloud, this takes the form of MIG. MIGs provide a control plane on top of Compute Engine resources that addresses several critical areas of effectively managing VM fleets. These areas include reliability, scaling, health, and change management.

Compute Engine supports both managed and unmanaged instance groups. Unmanaged instance groups provide a way to manually associate arbitrary instances for the purposes of control and load balancing. Unmanaged instance groups are generally used in specialized applications ...