Offering virtual machine (VM) products

A virtual machine (VM) product is a custom VM instance that your users can run on Compute Engine.

This page is an overview of what you need to do to distribute and maintain a VM product on Cloud Marketplace.

For an overview of Compute Engine concepts, see the Compute Engine documentation.

If you're new to Compute Engine, see the Compute Engine Overview, or try a Compute Engine Quickstart.

Before you begin

Product-specific requirements

If you want to publish a VM product, it must meet the following requirements:

  1. It must deploy software to, and run on, Compute Engine.
  2. It must use the Cloud Marketplace-hosted image with the attached Compute Engine license.
  3. It must comply with Cloud Marketplace open source policy.
  4. It must have been tested end to end before you submitted it.
  5. If you or Google Cloud identify any critical security issues related to the product, you must update it to resolve the issues.

Checklist

At a high level, you must do the following:

  1. Set up your Google Cloud environment so that you can distribute and display your product on Cloud Marketplace.
  2. Review the pricing options, and select a pricing model. Pricing models take up to four business days to review. You can continue setting up your VM product while the pricing model is being processed.
  3. Build your VM image.
  4. Create your deployment package.
  5. Test your product end-to-end.
  6. Submit your product to Cloud Marketplace. To publish your product, you submit various parts of your product for review. The Cloud Marketplace team reviews each submission and works with you to resolve any issues before approving it. After all reviews are approved, you can publish and launch the product within a few minutes.
  7. Maintain and monitor your product after it has launched.

If you have questions during the onboarding process, contact Partner Support Desk to request assistance, and include the word "Marketplace" in your description. For more information about Partner Support Desk, visit Request assistance with Cloud Marketplace.