Cloud Marketplace
Cloud Marketplace deploys pre-configured, ready-to-run solutions (a full Jenkins CI environment, a LAMP stack, WordPress, and so on) with no manual VM, network, or storage setup - what would take hours or days by hand launches in minutes. Listings come from third-party vendors who ship their own declarative deployment configurations, so you deploy now and scale later when the application needs more capacity. After deployment you administer the software through its own UI and SSH into the host VM as normal.
- Production-grade solutions from third-party vendors, pre-packaged as deployment configs (Terraform today; older listings use Deployment Manager).
- Single bill - Marketplace charges are billed together with the rest of your project's Google Cloud services.
- Bring-your-own-license (BYOL) - if you already hold a license for a third-party product, some listings let you reuse it instead of paying again.
- Managed images - Google patches the published images for critical issues and vulnerabilities, and notifies you when a security update is available.
- Direct partner support for the vendor's software.
Marketplace is just a deployment config
The key exam concept: a Marketplace listing is a pre-built infrastructure-as-code configuration. When you click Deploy, Google Cloud runs that config - historically this drops you straight into Deployment Manager, where you can inspect the generated config and imported template files. The solution provisions and wires up every resource for you (VM, boot disk, firewall rules), so you never recreate them by hand.
The deployed VM also shows up in the normal Compute Engine instance list - it is an ordinary VM once running. The overview page hands you the site address, an admin user and generated password, and next steps you'd otherwise wire up yourself: open HTTPS traffic, change the password, or swap the default ephemeral external IP for a static one.
Marketplace keeps the published images current for critical issues and vulnerabilities, but it does not touch software you have already deployed. Once your VM is running, patching and upgrades are on you (or the vendor's support), exactly like any other Compute Engine instance.
Marketplace removes the setup work, not the cost. Many listings are free software with no usage fee, but you are billed for the Compute Engine, disk, and network resources they provision (subject to normal sustained-use discounts) - and some listings carry their own commercial licensing fees.