Difference between Virtual machine and instance

Question

I have been gone through Google cloud services for my project requirement. I am little bit confused the terms used in Google cloud. I would like to know what is the difference between VM and instance or both are same? If both terms are difference, in terms of what?

As far as my understanding VM is also known as instance. It means if I am creating one instance, i am creating one VM. If I am creating multi VM, that means i am creating more than 1 instance. Am I right?

I am trying to find correct explanation across google search. But unfortunately, I couldn't get. Really appreciate if anyone help me to understand the above confusion. Thanks in advance

Answer 1

@vasethvan I think your understanding is generally correct. For all practical purposes on Google cloud you may use the terms interchangeably. An instance is a virtual machine (VM) hosted on Google's infrastructure. per documentation at https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/instances/

In general you can run a VM on Google cloud or any other cloud or even your own desktop. Per wikipedia In computing, a virtual machine (VM) is an emulation of a particular computer system

Cloud providers (like google) allow you to define Virtual Machine "images" or use pre-defined images which can be used to create one or more Virtual Machine instances that look alike. An VM image is a blue print of a machine emulation and instances are live running copies of that image. In practise often VM and instance terms are use interchangeably.