September 2018
Intermediate to advanced
632 pages
21h 40m
English
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Chapter 9. Compute Engine: virtual machines
This chapter covers
- What are virtual machines (VMs)?
- Using persistent storage with virtual machines
- How auto-scaling works
- Spreading traffic across multiple machines with a load balancer
- Compute Engine’s pricing structure
As you’ve learned, virtual machines are chopped-up pieces of a single physical system that are shared between several people. This isn’t a new idea—even 10 years ago this was how virtual private servers were sold—but the idea certainly has gotten more advanced with Cloud hosting platforms like Google Cloud Platform and Amazon Web Services. For example, it’s now possible to decouple the virtual machine from the physical machine, so physical machines can be taken offline for maintenance ...