Creating an Image of Compute Engine Instance

Go to the compute engine service page and then click on Create Instance
Now on the create instance page you can fill in a lot of details about your instance so let’s start
Name: Here you can enter the name of the instance, for example enter the name of the instance as webserver
Label: Here you can add labels to the instance so labels are key-value pair, for example environment: prod
Then you can select the Machine Family for your instance
For the purpose of this demo you will select the Machine series as N1 and machine type as g1-small
In this section you would be changing the boot disk
Boot disk is nothing but the operating system disk so whenever you change the boot disk you are ultimately changing the operating system image
So here you will click on Change
And you be selecting the operating system is CentOS then you will click on Select
In this section you can change the default service account with the service account which you will create in identity and access management service
You can also define the network tags so you will select allow HTTP traffic & HTTPS traffic, this will basically add the HTTP and HTTPS network tag to your instance
Now finally you will click on the Create button
Once the instance is created you would be able to see the instance in the dashboard
You can click on the SSH button and that will open the SSH browser based window where you can clean your Linux command on your compute engine instance

Now since we are connected to the SSH console of our compute engine instance
So we let you install an Apache web server, you can run below commands

#this command basically elevates your privileges as a superuser in Linux
sudo su

#this command updates your Linux operating system and the packages installed
yum update -y

#this command will install Apache web server
yum install httpd -y

#this command will start Apache web server
service httpd start

#this command will make sure whenever you restart your Linux machine Apache web server is restarted automatically
chkconfig httpd on

#this command creates a index dot HTML web page with the Webmagic informatica as the content inside Apache web server public directory
echo "WebMagic Informatica" > /var/www/html/index.html

Now once everything is created you will need to stop the web server before you can create a new image
Now from your compute engine dashboard, go to Images and click on Create Image
Now inside image dialog box you would need to enter the Name of the image and you will need to select a source disk which would be virtual machine or the web server disk which you have created.
You can also choose the image location, it would be multiregional which means the image replica would be present in different regions within US or whichever multi-region you select or it could be regional which means it would be available only in one region
Now click on Create
Now you can see image getting created
Now while creating virtual machine if you select boot disk and if you go to custom images you will have an option to select the image which you created as part of this lab
Do not delete this image because you would be needing this image for the next labs