Practicing on Cloud VMs

Here are some logistics you will need to prepare before hand:

1. Laptop

2. Google Cloud account with free trial activated. Credit card details are needed but don’t have to charge it

   • https://cloud.google.com/free

3. Go into your Google Cloud console

   
4. Go to Create a VM

   
5. Enable the Compute Engine API

   

Create a new VM

Go to your google cloud console and create a new VM.

Choose the following settings:

1. Name: Choose your own name or leave it as the default setting

2. Region: Choose your preferred region but it is recommended to diversify away from the popular regions (e.g. US, EU) for mainnet setups to minimise the risk of correlated downtime. I am going with Singapore in this example.

3. Zone: Choose any

4. Machine configuration: E2

5. Machine type: e2-standard-8, 16GB memory

Under Boot disk, click on the "change" button.

Select Ubuntu for the operating system, Ubuntu 24.04 LTS x86 for the version, SSD persistent disk for the boot disk type, and 300 GB for the size of the storage.

Select No service account under "Identity and API access".

Check the first 2 boxes under the "Firewall" section.

Once you are done, click on the "Create" button at the bottom of the screen.

Expected output: You should see your VM instance coming online after loading for a few seconds

Click on the dropdown beside the "SSH" column and select "Open in browser window". Click on "Authorize" when prompted.

Expected output: Wait for the new window to load and your Ubuntu terminal will appear.

Once you are logged into your VM via SSH, run a general update using the command below.

sudo apt update -y && sudo apt upgrade -y

Then, jump straight into the Device level security setup section next.

Device level security setup