Managed instance groups are a pretty fine way to automate virtual machines, but as we have already seen, VM instances are only a small part of the full suite of services a cloud platform has to offer. You might legitimately even question whether MIGs constitute IAC; after all, MIGs can be scripted using gcloud but not really using a programming language. To that extent, MIGs are a primitive form of infrastructure automation, but far from the real deal.

Let's say you needed to instantiate 1000 VM instances and each with a specific instance hostname and unique customized configuration. How would you go about this?

Here are some options:

• Get someone to sit and create them, one by one, using the web UI. This is not as inefficient as it sounds because the configurations are all different from each other, many organizations have teams that do exactly this...