Create similar VM from API to multiple users

[PSM-UY]

Based on this option

https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/instances/create-vm-from-similar-instance

Is there a way to clone or copy a VM using API?

I need to assign multiple users a VM similar than the one I work it, and we are trying to do this from firebase app with the google API. But can't find the API or console option for this.

Thanks.

[kolban]

I think the trick to this puzzle will be to ask "What does it mean to create a VM similar to the one I have".  From what I glean reading the page, it seems that the new VM will basically be one that is created with similar/identical configuration to the one you already have.  Since there are APIs and command line tools that can retrieve the configuration of one VM and create a new VM with arbitrary configurations, it would appear that the solution would be use two APIs. One to query a VMs current settings and a second API to create a new VM with specific settings.

[PSM-UY]

Not just the configuration, but what the user have done in it. Every software installed and SO changes. We want to clone the VM and give it to someone else.

[kolban · Accepted solution]

All the commands that can be executed by the gcloud command line tool can also be executed by API.  This means that if we can find a recipe using gcloud, we can do the same thing using API.  It looks like we can use

gcloud compute disk snapshot

to create a snapshot of a VM disk.  Once we have a snapshot, we can create a new VM disk using that as a base image using:

gcloud compute disks create --souce-snapshot

when you create your new VM, you can then use this newly created disk as the attached disk to your VM and we should have achieved the goal.