Google Compute Engine is now Generally Available with expanded OS support,
transparent maintenance, and lower prices
By Ari Balogh, Vice President, Cloud Platform
Cross-posted from the Google
Cloud Platform Blog
Google Cloud Platform gives developers the
flexibility to architect applications with both managed and unmanaged services that run on
Google’s infrastructure. We’ve been working to improve the developer experience across our
services to meet the standards our own engineers would expect here at Google.
Today,
Google Compute
Engine is Generally Available (GA), offering virtual machines that are performant,
scalable, reliable, and offer industry-leading security features like encryption of data at
rest. Compute Engine is available with 24/7 support and a 99.95% monthly
SLA for your mission-critical
workloads. We are also introducing several new features and lower prices for persistent disks
and popular compute instances.
Expanded operating system support
During Preview, Compute Engine supported two of the most popular Linux distributions,
Debian and
Centos, customized with a Google-built kernel. This
gave developers a familiar environment to build on, but some software that required specific
kernels or loadable modules (e.g. some file systems) were not supported. Now you can run
any
out-of-the-box Linux distribution (including
SELinux and
CoreOS) as well as any
kernel or software you like, including
Docker,
FOG,
xfs and
aufs. We’re also announcing support for SUSE
and
Red Hat Enterprise
Linux (in Limited Preview) and
FreeBSD.
Transparent maintenance with live migration and automatic restart
At Google, we have found that regular maintenance of hardware and software infrastructure is
critical to operating with a high level of reliability, security and performance. We’re
introducing
transparent
maintenance that combines software and data center innovations with
live migration technology to
perform proactive maintenance while your virtual machines keep running. You now get all the
benefits of regular updates and proactive maintenance without the downtime and reboots
typically required. Furthermore, in the event of a failure, we
automatically
restart your VMs and get them back online in minutes. We’ve already rolled out this
feature to our US zones, with others to follow in the coming months.
New 16-core instances
Developers have asked for instances with even greater computational power and memory for
applications that range from silicon simulation to running high-scale NoSQL databases. To
serve their needs, we’re launching
three new
instance types in Limited Preview with up to 16 cores and 104 gigabytes of RAM. They
are available in the familiar standard, high-memory and high-CPU shapes.
Faster, cheaper Persistent Disks
Building highly scalable and reliable applications starts with using the right storage. Our
Persistent Disk service offers you strong, consistent performance along with much higher
durability than local disks. Today we’re lowering the price of Persistent Disk by 60% per
Gigabyte and dropping I/O charges so that you get a predictable, low price for your block
storage device. I/O available to a volume scales linearly with size, and the largest
Persistent Disk volumes have up to 700% higher peak I/O capability. You can read more about
the improvements to Persistent Disk in our
previous
blog post.
10% Lower Prices for Standard Instances
We’re also lowering prices on our most popular standard Compute Engine instances by 10% in all
regions.
Customers and partners using Compute Engine
In the past few months, customers like
Snapchat,
Cooladata,
Mendelics,
Evite and
Wix have built complex systems on Compute Engine and
partners like
SaltStack,
Wowza,
Rightscale,
Qubole,
Red
Hat,
SUSE, and
Scalr have joined our
Cloud Platform Partner Program, with new
integrations with Compute Engine.
“We find that Compute Engine scales quickly, allowing us to
easily meet the flow of new sequencing requests… Compute Engine has helped us scale with our
demands and has been a key component to helping our physicians diagnose and cure genetic
diseases in Brazil and around the world.”
- David Schlesinger, CEO of Mendelics
"Google Cloud Platform provides the most consistent performance we’ve ever
seen. Every VM, every disk, performs exactly as we expect it to and gave us the ability to
build fast, low-latency applications."
- Sebastian Stadil, CEO of Scalr
We’re looking forward to this next step for
Google Cloud Platform as we continue to help developers and businesses everywhere benefit from
Google’s technical and operational expertise.
Ari Balogh is the Vice President, Cloud Platform at Google and manages the teams
responsible for building Google Cloud Platform and other parts of Google’s internal
infrastructure.
Posted by Scott Knaster,
Editor
