Cloud Deployment Manager reached end of support on March 31, 2026.
If you currently use Deployment Manager, please migrate to Infrastructure Manager or an alternative deployment technology.

For more information on the deprecation and shutdown, see Deployment Manager deprecation.

Manage Google Cloud resources as a deployment

You can use Google Cloud Deployment Manager to create a set of Google Cloud resources and manage them as a unit, called a deployment. For example, if your team's development environment needs two virtual machines (VMs) and a BigQuery database, you can define these resources in a configuration file, and use Deployment Manager to create, change, or delete these resources. You can make the configuration file part of your team's code repository, so that anyone can create the same environment with consistent results.

In this tutorial, you'll use Google Cloud Deployment Manager to create a virtual machine (VM) instance. You'll define the VM in a basic configuration file, and use that configuration file to create a deployment.

To complete this tutorial, you must be comfortable running commands in a Linux, macOS, or Windows terminal.

For an interactive version of this tutorial, open it in Cloud Shell, where you can edit the sample configuration and deploy your resources without installing anything on your workstation. If you want to follow the tutorial on your own computer, skip to the next section.

Before you begin

Sign in to your Google Cloud account. If you're new to Google Cloud, create an account to evaluate how our products perform in real-world scenarios. New customers also get $300 in free credits to run, test, and deploy workloads.

In the Google Cloud console, on the project selector page, select or create a Google Cloud project.

Roles required to select or create a project

Select a project: Selecting a project doesn't require a specific IAM role—you can select any project that you've been granted a role on.
Create a project: To create a project, you need the Project Creator role (roles/resourcemanager.projectCreator), which contains the resourcemanager.projects.create permission. Learn how to grant roles.

Go to project selector

Verify that billing is enabled for your Google Cloud project.

In the Google Cloud console, on the project selector page, select or create a Google Cloud project.

Roles required to select or create a project

Select a project: Selecting a project doesn't require a specific IAM role—you can select any project that you've been granted a role on.
Create a project: To create a project, you need the Project Creator role (roles/resourcemanager.projectCreator), which contains the resourcemanager.projects.create permission. Learn how to grant roles.

Go to project selector