Custom Appliances are often made available through public marketplace images.

To search for an instance from Compute Engine -> Images - you may not find the marketplace images show up in the search results.  That is because 'Marketplace' is a service in GCP - look for that service and then research for the public image

How to retrieve the GCP marketplace image programmatically?

The second thing to remember  (for automation purposes) - marketplace images can be accessed directly via their public end point

image = "https://www.googleapis.com/compute/v1/projects/f5-7626-networks-public/global/images/image-resource-id-in-GCP-marketplace"

Summary

It took me a while to figure out how to search and find GCP marketplace images via the console. And secondly, how to programmatically retrieve these images. Hope this helps.

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