Welcome back and welcome to this demonstration. You can create instance templates through the Google Cloud Platform Console, the gcloud compute tool or through the API. In this demonstration, I am going to show you how to create an instance template via the console.

To create my instance template, I need to browse to Compute Engine and then to Instance Templates. So, let's go ahead and browse here. This Instance Templates page shows all existing instance templates that have been created. To begin the creation of my instance template, I just have to click Create Instance Template up here at the top. From this Create an instance template page, I can provide the specifics for my template. I can either accept the default values or I can provide specifics as necessary. 

In a default configuration, the machine type is set to n-1standard-1 and the boot disc image is set to the latest Debian image. The disk itself is a standard persistent disk that's 10GB in size. If I click down here on "Management, security, disks, network, sole tenancy" and look at the network settings, I can see here that the image connects to the default network and is assigned an ephemeral IP address. 

If we bounce over to Disks, here, I can see that I can add more disks to my instance template, if necessary. Other optional settings are accessed via the Management tab, the Security tab and via the Sole Tenancy tab. If I click Equivalent REST at the bottom of the page here, I can see the REST requests body which includes the JSON representation of my instance template. If I click "command line" here, it shows me how to create my template via the gcloud command line using parameters I've chosen. I can even click "run in Cloud Shell" here to create my template in Cloud Shell using these parameters.

For this exercise though I'm just going to close this out and then I'm going to click Create down here at the bottom to create my instance template. With my instance template created here, I can now view it in this instance templates page. I can also click the ellipses over here at the right, and then from here I can either create a VM from my instance template or create an instance group from my instance template. What I'll do here is just show you what happens when I click Create VM from my instance template.

We can see here we have the source template. And then we can configure our VM with whatever settings we need, or we can just leave the settings as they are, as they were configured in the instance template. And then again we just go through, click Create to spin up our VM based on the instance template that we created.