Slightly off-topic, but not too off-topic question: Does GCE have a text format for its configuration?<p>My pet peeve with cloud services and their web-based admin GUIs is that you have to use the GUI or the APIs to do anything. You can&#x27;t capture the current configuration and then replay it if anything is misconfigured. You can&#x27;t save or restore the config. You can&#x27;t diff the config across versions. Most SaaSes don&#x27;t even have audit logs, or if they do, they&#x27;re too minimalistic to provide the ability to get a lot of detail or roll back anything.<p>My wish list item is a kind of &quot;Puppet for GCE&quot;. I write my manifest, push them to the cloud, and stuff happens. If something isn&#x27;t mentioned in my manifest, it gets deleted. Truthfully, I don&#x27;t want to use a web GUI at all.<p>At the very least there should be a way to do an inventory of an account. Recently I needed to take over an older AWS account, and I wanted to find out what was in it — instances, load balancers, buckets, and so on. It&#x27;s virtually impossible to do this with the management console since the ontology of possibly configurable objects is so huge and complicated, and pretty much everything has a computer-generated hash instead of a human name, so I was surprised when I couldn&#x27;t find anything.