Google Cloud Platform for Developers

Infrastructure as Code (IaC)

As with all other services on Google Cloud, Compute Engine is fully controllable through publicly available APIs. The operations to create and manage VMs and their related infrastructure can (and usually should) be codified, a concept generally referred to as IaC. Employment of IaC techniques is critical in order to achieve reliable, repeatable system deployments.

While the simplest form of IaC is to maintain a collection of scripted API calls, this approach tends not to scale well as the complexity of system infrastructure increases. There are a number of ways to make the process of codifying infrastructure more manageable, including both Google-provided solutions and popular third-party solutions.

There are ...