Instance states (running, stopped, terminated) in GCP - Mini Project: Build & Apply

Instance states (running, stopped, terminated)

📖 Scenario: You are managing virtual machines (instances) in Google Cloud Platform (GCP). Each instance can be in one of three states: running, stopped, or terminated. You want to organize and track these instances by their states.

🎯 Goal: Create a data structure to hold instance names and their states, add a filter to select only running instances, then list those running instances, and finally configure a simple output format to display them.

📋 What You'll Learn

Create a dictionary called instances with exact instance names and states

Add a variable called desired_state set to the string 'running'

Use a list comprehension called running_instances to select instance names with state matching desired_state

Create a final dictionary called output with key 'running_instances' and value running_instances

💡 Why This Matters

🌍 Real World

Cloud administrators often need to track and manage virtual machine states to optimize costs and performance.

💼 Career

Understanding instance states and filtering them programmatically is essential for cloud operations and automation roles.

1

Create the initial instance states dictionary

Create a dictionary called instances with these exact entries: 'vm-1': 'running', 'vm-2': 'stopped', 'vm-3': 'terminated', 'vm-4': 'running'

GCP

# Create the instances dictionary with exact names and states
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use curly braces to create a dictionary with keys as instance names and values as their states.

2

Add the desired state variable

Add a variable called desired_state and set it to the string 'running'

GCP

instances = {
    'vm-1': 'running',
    'vm-2': 'stopped',
    'vm-3': 'terminated',
    'vm-4': 'running'
}
# Set the desired_state variable to 'running'
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Assign the string 'running' to the variable desired_state.

3

Select running instances using list comprehension

Create a list comprehension called running_instances that includes instance names from instances where the state equals desired_state

GCP

instances = {
    'vm-1': 'running',
    'vm-2': 'stopped',
    'vm-3': 'terminated',
    'vm-4': 'running'
}
desired_state = 'running'
# Create running_instances list with names where state matches desired_state
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use a list comprehension to filter keys where the value matches desired_state.

4

Create the final output dictionary

Create a dictionary called output with a key 'running_instances' and value running_instances

GCP

instances = {
    'vm-1': 'running',
    'vm-2': 'stopped',
    'vm-3': 'terminated',
    'vm-4': 'running'
}
desired_state = 'running'
running_instances = [name for name, state in instances.items() if state == desired_state]
# Create output dictionary with key 'running_instances' and value running_instances
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Create a dictionary with the key exactly as 'running_instances' and assign the list running_instances as its value.