Google Cloud has unveiled Machine Images, an innovative form of Compute Engine resource to make backup workflows much easier.
Machine Images have countless and significant advantages over standard images. While a standard image is able to capture only a single drive with all its different resources and apps, Machine Images prove to be far more comprehensive and can include multiple disks.
Moreover, they can also include everything required to create a new instance of that machine. A machine image would instance properties, instance metadata and permissions, and data for all attached disks.
Ari Liberman, the Product Manager of Google Compute Engine, wrote backing up an instance requires more than just disk data and we need instance properties like the machine type, network tags, labels, and more to recreate an instance. Liberman added capturing this information is easier with machine images and added it stores the instance information and disk data into a single resource when we create a machine image from an instance.
It was also remarked that all we need to do is provide the machine image and a new instance name when it comes time to restore the instance. Liberman further added that Machine images can be created whether the source instance is running or stopped.
Customers can start working with machine images immediately via the “the Cloud Console, gcloud or the API.”
Liberman added the new machine images make it easy to create new instances at the heart of your scalability, backup and disaster recovery strategy. It was further remarked that machine images use the same differential disk backup technology that powers incremental snapshots, giving you fast, reliable and cost-effective instance backups in addition to storing complete instance properties and data.
