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Google Compute Engine is an Infrastructure as a Service product that competes directly with AWS.https://dudodiprj2sv7.cloudfront.net/product-logos/K5/Ss/7UQI3DC922FW.PNGAwesome GPU accelerated instances but UI/docs could use some workWe use Google Compute Engine for creating cloud virtual machines that are GPU-accelerated. Because we have centralized most of our backend services to DigitalOcean, we use Google Compute Engine for most of the services that DigitalOcean doesn't offer. Additionally, we use the custom image functionality that GCE offers to create VMs with custom images.,Great scalability. The cloud VMs all have elastic specs functionality, but re-scaling some VMs may create a significant amount of downtime for your backend. GPU offerings. Google Cloud offers NVIDIA Tesla K80s, P4s, and P100s, which some of the cloud computing competitors don't offer. Downtime, Google's SLA is very good. I've never had a poor experience with downtime or maintenance on their services.,Internet speed can be quite variable. The bandwidth for different instances ranges a lot. Some instances have had internet bandwidth that is in the range of 5-10x the speed of other instances. Customizability. Customizing the number of cores, RAM beyond what Google offers in their standard compute plans can get quite expensive. Firewalls/networking. Figuring out how to use these took way longer than necessary. Getting the right ports opened and forwarded took lots of reading, something that other services included in the creation/initialization process of virtual machines.,7,Positive. Suggestions on re-configuring specs. If you aren't using all the RAM or CPU threads, suggestions are sent to re-configure your virtual machine to minimize your bill at the end of the month. Negative. Expensive custom machines. If you're looking for a more exact figure of RAM or CPUs, the virtual machines get quite expensive fairly quickly. Negative. Internet bandwidth variability. The internet bandwidth you get, from my experience, is all dependent on your luck. :(,Amazon Web Services,Google Authenticator, Google Kubernetes Engine, Google Pay (formerly Google Wallet)Google does it rightWe use it for running managing docker containers inside clusters. GCE provides the flexibility for auto scaling and managing application performance easily. It used for running all the applications across departments,Custom machine types gives us the flexibility of defining the right cpu and memory Load balancers are efficient Easily create instances using gCloud SDK,Very little programming languages support Charged before usage Changing platforms is not easy,10,Less worry about infrastructure Cheaper than competitors Good customer support,AWS Elastic Beanstalk,AWS Lambda, New Relic APM, Sumo Logic, ApigeeGCE: An Easy Choice for Hosting Web Software at ScaleWe use Google Compute Engine to host our cloud-based web application. We manage a multi-node, shared instance of our application for thousands of monthly users, as well as individual, dedicated instances for a few of our larger clients. We are a fairly small organization and GCE manages all of our hosting needs. GCE is very straightforward to use, most of our engineers interact with it on a daily basis. Using GCE means that we can forget about the pains of maintaining computing hardware and just focus on making great software. As a Google Apps user, we also benefit from GCE's rich integration with the rest of the Google product line. Picking GCE over competitors was an easy choice for us.,A simple web-based interface that is a breeze to train new engineers to use. Our experienced engineers never have trouble finding or doing anything on GCE. Sustained use and Committed use discounts mean we get top-tier VMs for an incredibly competitive price. Wonderful identity and access management that gives us peace-of-mind when granting access to machines to contractors and other 3rd parties. Fast VMs, lastest in hardware, and enough RAM to power even the hungriest of our services.,Built-in monitoring via Stackdriver is quite expensive for what it provides. Initially provided quotas (ie. max compute units one can use) are very low and it took several requests to get an appropriate amount. Support on GCE is limited to their knowledge base and forums. For more hands-on support provided by Google, you must pay for their Premium services.,9,We don't need to hire server admins or infrastructure engineers and instead our web engineers are more than capable of maintaining all of our services. Fast-boot VMs and top-tier SLA mean that GCE keeps up with our fast release cycle. We use instance templates to quickly launch dedicated services for our clients. They are often amazed at our less than a 24-hour turnaround.,Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), DigitalOcean and Heroku,Kubernetes, CouchDB, NginxEasy to start VMs, choose from any configuration you want, good pricingCompute Engine is a general purpose VM on top of which you can run basically any software you want, including Windows. They are priced on per-hour basis with discounts when you use it for a long time, and also with an option to run a VM for a short time with significant discount, but at a risk that it could be terminated at any time (Preemptible VM) – it's very useful for data processing since you can spawn tens of VMs for cheap and even if they are terminated you can just do it again later.,Per-hour pricing with sustained use discounts -- you'll get a good discount if you run a VM for a long time. Always free usage limits -- you can run a small VM on it completely free of charge! Preemptible VM – huge discounts when you only want to run it for a short time, but it could be terminated if there's a demand. GPU support -- useful if you want to control your ML training jobs by yourself instead of using their Cloud ML APIs.,Sustained use discounts could be combined with committed use discounts -- just give me cheaper price if I'm running a VM for a year,10,We can spawn up almost any amount of "cores" at anytime, which is very helpful for data processing.,Google App Engine,Google App Engine, Google Cloud StorageMy two years experience with Google Compute EngineGoogle Compute Engine is for maintaining our organizational department wise projects such as online training applications, online student registrations, blog posts, tutorials, etc. We need to separate our organization projects in the various department because these applications are developed for solving several problems for filtered users. Google Compute Engine is used for hosting our online students' maintenance and other related tasks.,Google Compute Engine gives us easy ability to maintain the servers including live statistics about what is going on. Easy single click to extend server system including network changing. Easy to clone servers between multiple regions. Google Compute Engine has one-click installer (pre-built) applications including Bitnami launchpad. Easy to integrate with cloud storage and backup periodically source codes and database to storage facility,Sometimes it is hard to remember the settings menus because these are separated into various sections. Inviting external users to projects or maintainers are also a little complex Server images have limited facilities. I mean some of the sections are disabled and had to be re-enabled on my own. Especially for Debian or Ubuntu images. SMTP service is disabled by system and needs to be configured Postfix on my own. UI is little complicated.,9,Google Compute Engine's startup prices are quite reasonable to get started. Started with $300 free credits that help to sustain the business structure. Our primary servers hosted at our nearest locations that help to reduce time to load. Also getting good feedback from users server speed is overall because of closest location.,Digital Ocean,Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), DigitalOcean, OpenShift,4,4,Student management system Online training service Blog/ Tutorial submission,NoSQL database service Storing data only Cloud Storage facility,9,Migration Pre-built application images Browser-based SSH connection facility.,Setup the pre-built images with my own modifications Understanding monthly prices after sustained discount,Yes,9
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Google Compute Engine
79 Ratings
Score 8.8 out of 101
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Google Compute Engine Reviews

Google Compute Engine
79 Ratings
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Score 8.8 out of 101
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Fedor Paretsky profile photo
January 16, 2019

Google Compute Engine: "Awesome GPU accelerated instances but UI/docs could use some work"

Fedor Paretsky
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Review Source
We use Google Compute Engine for creating cloud virtual machines that are GPU-accelerated. Because we have centralized most of our backend services to DigitalOcean, we use Google Compute Engine for most of the services that DigitalOcean doesn't offer. Additionally, we use the custom image functionality that GCE offers to create VMs with custom images.
  • Great scalability. The cloud VMs all have elastic specs functionality, but re-scaling some VMs may create a significant amount of downtime for your backend.
  • GPU offerings. Google Cloud offers NVIDIA Tesla K80s, P4s, and P100s, which some of the cloud computing competitors don't offer.
  • Downtime, Google's SLA is very good. I've never had a poor experience with downtime or maintenance on their services.
  • Internet speed can be quite variable. The bandwidth for different instances ranges a lot. Some instances have had internet bandwidth that is in the range of 5-10x the speed of other instances.
  • Customizability. Customizing the number of cores, RAM beyond what Google offers in their standard compute plans can get quite expensive.
  • Firewalls/networking. Figuring out how to use these took way longer than necessary. Getting the right ports opened and forwarded took lots of reading, something that other services included in the creation/initialization process of virtual machines.
For companies that require GPU-accelerated instances, GCE may be your only good option. They offer a lot of services that aren't available at the next best cloud computing platform (in my opinion), DigitalOcean. Beyond the functionality, the UI and documentation can be approved a lot, but if you're used to the way Google designs their developer tools and APIs, then you're probably all set with moving forward with Google's Compute Engine.
Read Fedor Paretsky's full review
No photo available
August 17, 2018

Google Compute Engine Review: "Google does it right"

Verified User
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Review Source
We use it for running managing docker containers inside clusters. GCE provides the flexibility for auto scaling and managing application performance easily. It used for running all the applications across departments
  • Custom machine types gives us the flexibility of defining the right cpu and memory
  • Load balancers are efficient
  • Easily create instances using gCloud SDK
  • Very little programming languages support
  • Charged before usage
  • Changing platforms is not easy
Small businesses can easily scale their applications with little up front cost in setting up the infrastructure for their application.
Read this authenticated review
Tyler Johnson profile photo
May 04, 2018

Google Compute Engine Review: "GCE: An Easy Choice for Hosting Web Software at Scale"

Tyler Johnson
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Review Source
We use Google Compute Engine to host our cloud-based web application. We manage a multi-node, shared instance of our application for thousands of monthly users, as well as individual, dedicated instances for a few of our larger clients. We are a fairly small organization and GCE manages all of our hosting needs.

GCE is very straightforward to use, most of our engineers interact with it on a daily basis. Using GCE means that we can forget about the pains of maintaining computing hardware and just focus on making great software. As a Google Apps user, we also benefit from GCE's rich integration with the rest of the Google product line. Picking GCE over competitors was an easy choice for us.
  • A simple web-based interface that is a breeze to train new engineers to use. Our experienced engineers never have trouble finding or doing anything on GCE.
  • Sustained use and Committed use discounts mean we get top-tier VMs for an incredibly competitive price.
  • Wonderful identity and access management that gives us peace-of-mind when granting access to machines to contractors and other 3rd parties.
  • Fast VMs, lastest in hardware, and enough RAM to power even the hungriest of our services.
  • Built-in monitoring via Stackdriver is quite expensive for what it provides.
  • Initially provided quotas (ie. max compute units one can use) are very low and it took several requests to get an appropriate amount.
  • Support on GCE is limited to their knowledge base and forums. For more hands-on support provided by Google, you must pay for their Premium services.
We are a web software company and GCE has been great for hosting our web applications. We have a single-node and multi-node instances and GCE never misses a beat. We also have some Windows Server clients, so launching and testing our software in Windows is made possible by GCE. When comes to reliably hosting web infrastructure at scale, GCE is a fantastic choice.
Read Tyler Johnson's full review
Dmitry Sadovnychyi profile photo
August 04, 2017

Google Compute Engine Review: "Easy to start VMs, choose from any configuration you want, good pricing"

Dmitry Sadovnychyi
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Review Source
Compute Engine is a general purpose VM on top of which you can run basically any software you want, including Windows. They are priced on per-hour basis with discounts when you use it for a long time, and also with an option to run a VM for a short time with significant discount, but at a risk that it could be terminated at any time (Preemptible VM) – it's very useful for data processing since you can spawn tens of VMs for cheap and even if they are terminated you can just do it again later.
  • Per-hour pricing with sustained use discounts -- you'll get a good discount if you run a VM for a long time.
  • Always free usage limits -- you can run a small VM on it completely free of charge!
  • Preemptible VM – huge discounts when you only want to run it for a short time, but it could be terminated if there's a demand.
  • GPU support -- useful if you want to control your ML training jobs by yourself instead of using their Cloud ML APIs.
  • Sustained use discounts could be combined with committed use discounts -- just give me cheaper price if I'm running a VM for a year
Compute Engine provides VMs which you have to maintain by yourself, but you can run anything you want in there. Consider using App Engine for web sites, Container Engine for anything that needs to be often deployed and scaled automatically (if it doesn't fit into App Engine). On Compute Engine you can easily spawn up an instance with hundred GB of memory, do your stuff, and shut it down after couple of hours. You will only pay for what you used. But be careful -- there's some people who "forget" about running instances and then they are surprised with huge bills in the end of the month -- this is your responsibility to turn them off, since Google will do their part to make sure they are working flawlessly without any downtime.
Read Dmitry Sadovnychyi's full review
Sazzad Hossain Sharkar profile photo
October 11, 2017

Review: "My two years experience with Google Compute Engine"

Sazzad Hossain Sharkar
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Review Source
Google Compute Engine is for maintaining our organizational department wise projects such as online training applications, online student registrations, blog posts, tutorials, etc.

We need to separate our organization projects in the various department because these applications are developed for solving several problems for filtered users. Google Compute Engine is used for hosting our online students' maintenance and other related tasks.
  • Google Compute Engine gives us easy ability to maintain the servers including live statistics about what is going on.
  • Easy single click to extend server system including network changing. Easy to clone servers between multiple regions.
  • Google Compute Engine has one-click installer (pre-built) applications including Bitnami launchpad.
  • Easy to integrate with cloud storage and backup periodically source codes and database to storage facility
  • Sometimes it is hard to remember the settings menus because these are separated into various sections.
  • Inviting external users to projects or maintainers are also a little complex
  • Server images have limited facilities. I mean some of the sections are disabled and had to be re-enabled on my own. Especially for Debian or Ubuntu images.
  • SMTP service is disabled by system and needs to be configured Postfix on my own.
  • UI is little complicated.
If anyone, especially developers, whom are a newbie, they can quickly launch pre-built servers with desired applications easily. The projects come with the git repository that can rapidly be installed with a few single clicks.

If you have good experience, you can make a bridge to back up the project source codes or files to cloud storage quickly by doing some little functioning. There are manuals online for working with GCE

Non experienced Google Cloud Compute users will have some extra work when creating a new server. Must have to build it by oneself.
Read Sazzad Hossain Sharkar's full review
Raymond Hawkins profile photo
March 29, 2017

Google Compute Engine Review: "Wonderful IaaS for small businesses with room to grow"

Raymond Hawkins
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Review Source
We're a small custom software company with one main web-based program which we host on Google Compute Engine. Over the years we've gained more and more users and we were having issues scaling up as we grew, sometimes slowly and sometimes rapidly. Finally our old hosting solution had a bad down period and we were forced to look elsewhere to get our software back online. Since switching to Compute Engine, we've been able to save money while scaling up as needed. It has been very reliable and overall a perfect fit for us.
  • Compute instances can be resized with quite minimal down time.
  • They offer recommendations when an instance might need to be upgraded to improve performance or downgraded to save you money.
  • The ability to SSH into any of your instances from any browser or mobile device works extremely well and is very useful!
  • The cost of bandwidth is somewhat high.
Google Compute Engine is really great for web-based software that needs high availability and flexibility in scaling. I wouldn't necessarily recommend it for simple website hosting under most circumstances as the bandwidth can get expensive quickly if serving large files, but even for that it's very reliable and easy to set up and get started.
Read Raymond Hawkins's full review
Andy Zhang profile photo
March 24, 2017

Google Compute Engine: "GCE - the underrated underdog of the market"

Andy Zhang
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Review Source
It is being used across the whole organization. It addresses the problem of providing solutions to customers who need an all-inclusive infrastructure solution for web services and apps. It has a lot of systems that are managed by Google which people commonly build themselves without knowing that they are reinventing the wheel.
  • Clean and well-designed API
  • Simple, yet transparent reporting of usage
  • Generous and straightforward pricing
  • Missing GPUs for cloud instances
  • Excessively lean customer service department
  • Confusion as to how the container environment works in relation to GCE
I would recommend Google Compute Engine for companies with adept engineering teams that want to maximize the value of their talent and focus on the core strengths of their business (product, R&D, research, UX), rather than waste resources on infrastructure. The engineering team should have good knowledge of the tools available and how to stitch them together into a scalable product.
Read Andy Zhang's full review
David Long, SPA profile photo
February 24, 2017

Review: "Google Compute Engine: The ONLY choice for cloud computing"

David Long, SPA
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Review Source
We develop software for our clients and lean on Google Compute Engine and Google Container Engine for hosting those applications. These applications are used both across our clients' organizations as well as publicly by customers of these clients. We made the decision to use Google Compute Engine in order to reduce costs while getting solid reliability from a VPS platform. Google has provided us with both of those needs.
  • Spinning up new systems is a breeze. We are able to auto-scale our container engine clusters easily based on CPU usage or resource reservations.
  • Cost is ~1/2 of AWS in general. Google advertises this and so far they've been true to their word. They provide sustained-use discounts if you run systems that stay online for an entire month.
  • The command line interface is very easy to use. Setting up new environments is simple since the process can be scripted through the command line.
  • The L7 load balancer can be difficult to get set up. It's limited in its functionality, especially with the container engine.
  • It's hard to find certain objects on the web console. Often times the things I need to get to are buried in advanced menus.
  • Google's decision to only support MySQL on their relational DB service means that I have to manage Postgres instances in Compute on my own, managing everything from storage to backups.
If running a Kubernetes or any container engine environment, Google Compute is simply the best. Given that Kubernetes and containers in general are still fairly new in terms of widespread usage, there are hangups, but those seem to exist in any hosting platform. Google's terminology, as compared to Azure and AWS is also really easy to understand. If you want logging, it's called logging. If you want storage it's called storage. Where Google Compute falls short is the same as where all cloud providers fall short: if you want high resource systems that are always online, it will get expensive really quickly.
Read David Long, SPA's full review
No photo available
June 13, 2017

Google Compute Engine Review: "How we saved on VM cost by switching from Rackspace to GCE"

Verified User
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Review Source
Google Compute Engine (GCE) is Google's answer to AWS. We use GCE as a low-cost virtual host solution, and we purposefully migrated off AWS and Rackspace to GCE. We made the decision mostly based on cost, but also the flexibility of the toolkit and deployment. GCE is a one-stop shop for hosting virtual and scalable environments in the cloud.
  • GCE is an excellent tool for quick deployment of on demand servers.
  • GCE offers the ability to snapshot servers, create host clusters, and auto-scale based on demand.
  • GCE is the most cost effective virtual hosting environment we've used. They give up front pricing which is a major plus for us.
  • I can't think of any immediate areas GCE could improve on.
GCE is well suited for building scalable tools in the cloud. If you have an on demand service, GCE is a great tool for spinning up and down servers quickly. GCE can get expensive for full time applications using high network throughput. If you have a lot of data moving between servers, make sure you understand the cost associated with how information will be flowing over the network.
Read this authenticated review
No photo available
September 21, 2016

Google Compute Engine Review: "Benefits of Google Cloud for bespoke green-field applications"

Verified User
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Review Source
We use Google Compute Engine to support public facing clinical research patient recruitment services, the service is scalable to accommodate increase in capacity due to news items that sign post patients to the services. The platform is IaaS and data is shared with major health charities.
  • Google Compute Engine provides rapid scalability without the need to worry about the infrastructure itself, this means we can focus on core development of the service.
  • The platform makes it easy to link in to other Google apps and APIs.
  • Google does not lend itself to legacy technologies where you may require a cloud migration strategy.
  • While Google tends to solve their own problems and share solutions it can feel in bit one-way.
Google Compute Engine is great for rapid deployments and for green field developments however other cloud providers are geared to providing a migration path and strategy to support legacy services. Where analytics are concerned Google wins as they have a mature solution. Google tends to keep things simple and the environment encourages you to make use of the latest technology especially in the web services area.
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No photo available
April 11, 2016

"Google Compute Engine Review"

Verified User
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Review Source
It is being used by a department. It is used to host our school department's website, which is used by both teaching assistants and students.
  • UNIX-style command line tools
  • Web-based console panel
  • Persistent disks
  • Web console is a bit slow
Since it is still relatively new compared to Amazon's EC2, Google Compute Engine is not as appropriate for projects that need to be as reliable as possible. It is, however, fine for small projects.
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Google Compute Engine Scorecard Summary

Likelihood to Recommend (79)
8.8
Likelihood to Renew (1)
9.0
Usability (1)
9.0

Feature Scorecard Summary

Service-level Agreement (SLA) uptime (11)
9.7
Dynamic scaling (9)
9.2
Elastic load balancing (9)
9.4
Pre-configured templates (11)
9.6
Monitoring tools (11)
8.4
Pre-defined machine images (11)
9.5
Operating system support (11)
9.4
Security controls (11)
9.0

About Google Compute Engine

Google Compute Engine is an Infrastructure as a Service product that competes directly with AWS.
Categories:  Infrastructure-as-a-Service,  Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS)

Google Compute Engine Competitors

Google Compute Engine Technical Details

Deployment Types:SaaS
Operating Systems: Unspecified
Mobile Application:No