In the nine months since announcing Compute Engine, customers have been using
Google’s Infrastructure as a Service product and giving us valuable feedback. Sebastian Stadil
of Scalr wrote, in a recent
review:
“Google Compute Engine is not just fast. It’s Google fast. In fact, it’s a class of fast that
enables new service architectures entirely.”
We’re happy to hear that, because one of our main goals in building Compute Engine is
to enable a new generation of applications with direct access to the capabilities of Google’s
vast computing infrastructure.
Based on user feedback, we’ve added a number of major features including:
An improved administration console, the Google Cloud Console (preview), which
allows you to administer all your Google Cloud Platform services via a unified interface.
Here’s a screenshot of the new Cloud Console in action:
Five new instance type
families (diskless versions of our standard instance types, plus diskful and diskless versions
of high-memory and high-cpu configurations), with 16 new instance types.
Two new supported zones in Europe, which
provide lower latency and higher performance for our European customers. We’ve also made it
easy to migrate virtual machine instances from one zone to another via an enhancement to our
gcutil command line
tool.
An enhanced metadata server, with the ability to support recursive queries, blocking
gets and selectable response formats, along with support for updating virtual machine tags and metadata on running
instances (which enables dynamic reconfiguration scenarios).
While we've been hard at work developing new features, we've also had the opportunity
to play. Check out the amazing World Wide Maze
Chrome Experiment, developed by the Chrome team in Japan. This game converts any web
site of your choice into an interactive, three dimensional maze, navigated remotely via your
smartphone. Compute Engine virtual machines run Node.js to manage the game state and
synchronization with the mobile device, while Google App Engine hosts the game’s web UI. This
application provides an excellent example of the new kinds of rich, high performance back end
services enabled by Google Cloud Platform.
With today’s announcement, we look forward to welcoming many new customers, and
bringing exciting new applications to Google Cloud Platform!
Marc
Cohen is a Developer Programs Engineer focusing on helping developers get the most
out of Google’s advanced cloud computing technologies. He has over 25 years of experience
designing and building reliable, distributed systems in the telecommunications industry. A
Seattle resident, Marc enjoys programming, indie pop/rock music, blogging and
teaching.
By Marc
Cohen, Google Cloud Platform team
