News

Google Cloud Unveils Cost-Optimized, General-Purpose VMs

• By David Ramel
• 12/12/2019

The Google Cloud Platform (GCP) announced new cost-optimized, general-purpose virtual machines (VMs) to run on the Google Compute Engine.

The GCP previously offered three main machine types in addition to the first-generation N1 family that targets general-purpose scenarios, including:

• General purpose (N2): "N2 machine types provide a balance between price and performance. These VMs are well suited for most workloads, including line-of-business applications, web serving, and databases."
• Compute optimized (C2): "C2 machine types offer consistent high-end vCPU performance. These machine types are great for AAA gaming, EDA, HPC, and other applications."
• Memory optimized (M2): "M2 machine types offer the highest amount of memory. These VMs are well suited for in-memory databases, such as SAP HANA, real-time analytics, and in-memory caches."

This week, however, GCP announced a beta of the E2 family of VMs, featuring dynamic resource management to deliver reliable and sustained performance, flexible configurations, and what the company said is the best total cost of ownership of any of its VMs. The performance of E2 machine types, GCP said, was similar to the N1 family, and the E2 family provides:

• Lower TCO: "31% savings compared to N1, offering the lowest total cost of ownership of any VM in Google Cloud."
• Consistent performance: "Your VMs get reliable and sustained performance at a consistent low price point. Unlike comparable options from other cloud providers, E2 VMs can sustain high CPU load without artificial throttling or complicated pricing."
• Flexibility: "You can tailor your E2 instance with up to 16 vCPUs and 128 GB of memory. At the same time, you can provision only the resources that you need with 15 new predefined configurations or the ability to use custom machine types."

The E2 VMs, based on industry-standard x86 chips from Intel and AMD, were described by GCP as a great fit for a wide range of workloads suchh as web servers, business-critical applications, small-to-medium-sized databases and development environments. "If you have workloads that run well on N1, but don’t require large instance sizes, GPUs or local SSD, consider moving them to E2,' GCP said. "For all but the most demanding workloads, we expect E2 to deliver similar performance to N1, at a significantly lower cost."

GCP provided more information on machine types and pricing.