Availability policies

When maintenance events such as hardware or software updates require your VM to be moved to a different host machine, the Compute Engine automatically manages the scheduling behavior for your instances.

If you configure the instance's availability policy to use live migration, which is a very powerful feature, exclusive to GCP. Compute Engine will live migrate your VM instances, which prevents your applications from experiencing disruptions during maintenance. Alternatively, you can choose to terminate your instances during these events.

When viewing the instance details in the console, you will see the option that is currently enforced under the section Availability policies. One example of the VM configuration with the availability policy set to migrate the VM instance during maintenance is shown in the following screenshot: