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Google Compute Engine Makes Official Debut
Pay-as-you-use Google Compute Engine is a complement to the Google App Engine service.
As with anything Google, it's no news that the company has finally made its Google Compute Engine generally available. It's been in preview form for about a year, and GA means it's now an officially supported technology. With the official debut Google has cut standard compute engine pricing by 10 percent and added support for various key Linux distributions.
Google Compute Engine is one side of the compute story (the other is Google App Engine platform-as-a-service), which provides organizations with the ability to create and manage virtual machines in a pay-as-you-use plan. It supports Debian, CentOS, SELinux, CoreOS, as well as SUSE Linux and Red Hat Enterprise Linux and FreeBSD.
Google also introduces larger machine types, with a 16 CPU high-memory machine that can be configured with 16 virtual CPUs and 104GB of memory. It's currently only available by request in a limited preview scenario. Machine types come in standard (starting with 1 vCPU, 3.75GB of memory), high-memory and high-CPU configurations.
Google for the time being is lowering pricing of its per-GB persistent disk storage by 60 percent and not charging for I/O. Usage is billed in one-minute increments after the first 10 minutes, with introductory pricing at 10 percent less than what's shown on this page for each standard Compute Engine instance.
You can read more at this blog post on the Google Cloud Platform site.
About the Author
Michael Domingo has held several positions at 1105 Media, and is currently the editor in chief of Visual Studio Magazine.