Operating Systems

Google Compute Engine is compatible with many operating systems and distributions. You can use any operating system images offered by Compute Engine or you can create a custom image.

There are a number of operating systems that are currently available and ready to use on Compute Engine. These operating systems are provided by Google or by a third-party vendor. For more information, see the Images documentation.

The following two tables describe operating systems that are known to work with Compute Engine. The first table lists operating systems that are supported by Google Compute Engine. The second table lists operating systems that are community-supported.

For more information about each operating system, see the Linux or Windows documentation.

Contents

Operating systems with support from Compute Engine

For the following operating system images, you can get support with Google Compute Engine.

Operating systems with support outside of Compute Engine

For the following operating system images, you can get support with the resource listed under Support channel.

^*Compute Engine does not manage these operating systems and any questions or costs would be determined by the corresponding operating system community.

Operating systems that update automatically

Instances update automatically if they use public images for the following operating systems:

• CentOS
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux
• Ubuntu
• Windows

Automatic updates apply security patches and system upgrades to your running instances. RHEL and CentOS instances automatically update their installed packages in addition to the security patches and system upgrades.

Automatic updates apply system upgrades only for minor versions, and do not upgrade instances between major versions of the operating system.

Instances with private images do not update automatically by default.

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