Set Up A Virtual Environment In A Compute Engine VM In 5 Min.

Set up a virtual environment, install Python & pip and run Python scripts in a Google Cloud Compute Engine virtual machine.

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When I Learned How To Provision Google Cloud Compute Engine VMs And Why It Matters

“So how do I see the VM code? Is there, like, a window for that?” I’m sure the engineers that trained me found my question about Google Cloud Compute Engine instances overly basic and, possibly, concerning in its naïveté.

For context: One of my core responsibilities as a data engineer is responding to downtime alerts and debugging malfunctioning pipelines. While we use several tools to build pipelines, our core 3 are:

• Cloud Functions
• Airflow DAGs
• Compute Engine VMs

By the point I posed the initial question, I had considerable exposure to and debugging experience with both cloud functions and Airflow.

But VMs, themselves abstractions for an operating system remained, well, abstract.

Not overtly displaying source code like cloud functions or Airflow tasks, VMs were, for the longest time, a black box.