Question

A development team writes a Bash script that runs 'gcloud compute instances create' as part of a nightly automated job to ensure a set of standard utility VMs exists in a project. Occasionally the job fails because some of the VMs already exist from a previous run, causing the entire script to exit with an error and skip the creation of the remaining VMs. As the cloud architect, what should you advise the team to do to make the automation reliable and idempotent while still using the Cloud SDK?

Accepted Answer

Before each create command, run a 'gcloud compute instances describe' check for the instance and only invoke 'create' when the describe command returns a not-found result, allowing the script to skip existing VMs and continue.

Answer

Add the '--quiet' flag to every 'gcloud compute instances create' command so that the CLI suppresses prompts and errors and always returns a success exit code.

Answer

Wrap the whole script in a single 'gcloud compute instances create' call with multiple instance names and rely on the API to ignore any that already exist.

Answer

Schedule the script to first delete all utility VMs with 'gcloud compute instances delete', then recreate them from scratch on every run.