Copy a production Linux VM in us-central to a new instance in another project in us-east while keeping the copy easy to replace when production changes. Which steps do you take?

The correct approach involves creating a snapshot of the production VM's root disk. This snapshot can then be used to create a custom image in Compute Engine. This image can be stored in Cloud Storage and is globally accessible, allowing you to provision a new VM in a different region (us-east) and project. This method ensures that the new VM is an exact copy of the original and can be easily replaced or updated by creating new images from updated snapshots. Using dd and netcat is a manual, error-prone process not suitable for production environments or cross-project/region migrations. Creating a snapshot and directly selecting it as a root disk for a new VM is not a standard or supported cross-project/region workflow. Creating an image file with dd locally and then uploading it is less efficient and manageable than using Compute Engine's built-in image export functionality.