Let's look at deploying a virtual machine instance using an machine image. Once the image is deployed, the compute engine automatically starts the instance. The following diagram describes the high-level process of how a machine image can be used to deploy a compute instance. The image archive, which consists of the master boot records and the relevant partitions, is uploaded to cloud storage. You can then create a template/image, persistent disks, and then create a compute instance to boot off these disks:
You can create an instance from an image using the Google Cloud Platform console, the gcloud command-line tool ...
