While it's very easy to launch a compute instance using the Cloud Console, it's also quite easy to launch a compute instance using the Cloud SDK or G Cloud. In this demonstration, I'm going to show you how to launch a compute instance in GCP using the Cloud SDK. 

What we're going to do here is launch a basic VM with a default configuration. In doing so, you'll get to see which switches and commands are absolutely necessary to deploying a compute instance using G Cloud. 

As you can see on your screen here, I'm logged into my Google platform. To bring up the Cloud SDK, I simply click the Activate Cloud Shell icon along here at the top right corner. What I'll do here is expand this. 

From here, in order to launch a default compute instance, I'm going to use the G Cloud Compute Instances Create command. 

By running the G Cloud Compute Instances Create command and specifying "my new VM 3," we're going to deploy an instance called My New VM 3. By specifying the zone switch, we're telling GCP to deploy the instance in the US Central 1-A Zone. 

Once I hit Enter, the deployment begins. Since I haven't specified any network information, disc information, or OS information, GCP is going to provision a VM with default settings. In this case, my VM is going to be created as an M1 Standard-1 Machine type with a single nick. The image for my VM is going to be debian by default. If I switch over to my portal here and take a look, I can see My New VM 3 being deployed. Now, if I wanted to deploy an instance with a bit more customization, I could run the same command, but with additional switches to find. However, before doing that, I need to run the G Cloud Compute Images List command to see what public images are available. 

As you can see on your screen, we have quite a few images available to us here. I can also see the different projects and families for each image as well. With this information, I can specify the Image Switch and the Image Project Switch with the G Cloud Computer Instances Create command to specify which OS I want my VM to run. What I'll do here: I'll open a separate window to make things a little easier to see. Now, as you can see here, the command that I'm going to run creates a new VM called My New VM 4 and uses the Windows Server 2016 DC image under the Image Project Windows Cloud. What we're going to do is deploy the VM into the US Central 1-A Zone. 

So we'll go ahead and hit Enter here. And if we go up into our Instances pane here and refresh, we can see My New VM 4 shows up, and starts to deploy. For a complete list of all switches that you can use when deploying a compute instance with G Cloud, visit the URL that you see on your screen. 

So, while we're going to call it a wrap for this demo, I encourage you to experiment with many different switches in your own lab environment. You never know which switch may make an appearance on an exam.