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Google Compute Engine

Google Compute Engine

Overview

What is Google Compute Engine?

Google Compute Engine is an infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) product from Google Cloud. It provides virtual machines with carbon-neutral infrastructure which run on the same data centers that Google itself uses.

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Recent Reviews
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Awards

Products that are considered exceptional by their customers based on a variety of criteria win TrustRadius awards. Learn more about the types of TrustRadius awards to make the best purchase decision. More about TrustRadius Awards

Popular Features

View all 9 features
  • Security controls (45)
    7.3
    73%
  • Operating system support (45)
    7.2
    72%
  • Pre-defined machine images (44)
    6.2
    62%
  • Pre-configured templates (43)
    5.8
    58%

Reviewer Pros & Cons

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Pricing

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Preemptible Price - Predefined Memory

0.000892 / GB

Cloud
Hour

Three-year commitment price - Predefined Memory

$0.001907 / GB

Cloud
Hour

One-year commitment price - Predefined Memory

$0.002669 / GB

Cloud
Hour

Entry-level set up fee?

  • No setup fee
For the latest information on pricing, visithttps://cloud.google.com/compute/pricin…

Offerings

  • Free Trial
  • Free/Freemium Version
  • Premium Consulting/Integration Services
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Product Demos

Google Compute Engine Load Balancing, a quick introduction

YouTube

Computing with Google Compute Engine

YouTube

RouterOS CHR deployment in Google Compute Engine (GCE) demo

YouTube

Creating Custom Images for Google Compute Engine

YouTube

Hands on with Load Balancing on Google Compute Engine

YouTube
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Features

Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS)

IaaS provides the basic building blocks for an IT infrastructure like servers, storage, and networking, in an on-demand model over the Internet

6.8
Avg 8.1
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Product Details

What is Google Compute Engine?

Virtual machines for any workload

Online VMs on high-performance, reliable cloud infrastructure offered on preset or custom machine types for web servers, databases, or AI.


Includes one e2-micro VM instance, up to 30 GB storage, and up to 1 GB of outbound data transfers free per month.


Preset and custom configurations

Prebuilt samples called Jump Start Solutions can be used to deploy an application in minutes, such as a dynamic website, load-balanced VM, Java application, three-tier web app, or ecommerce web app.

Offers predefined machine types, sizes, and configurations for any workload, from large enterprise applications, to modern workloads (like containers) or AI/ML projects that require GPUs and TPUs.

For more flexibility, a custom machine type between 1 and 96 vCPUs with up to 8.0 GB of memory per core can be created. Also offers many block storage options, from flexible Persistent Disk to high performance and low-latency Local SSD.


Industry-leading reliability

Compute Engine boasts strong single instance compute availability SLA: 99.95% availability for memory-optimized VMs and 99.9% for all other VM families. Offers live migration to maintain workload continuity during planned and unplanned events. When a VM goes down, Compute Engine performs a live migration to another host in the same zone.


Automations and recommendations for resource efficiency

VMs can be added automatically to handle peak load and replace underperforming instances with managed instance groups.

Resources can be manually adjusted using historical data with rightsizing recommendations, or capacity for planned demand spikes can be guaranteed with future reservations. All of Google's latest compute instances (C3, A3, H3) run on Titanium, a system of purpose-built microcontrollers and tiered scale-out offloads to improve infrastructure performance, life cycle management, and security.


Pricing and discounting

Google offers detailed pricing guidance for any VM type or configuration, and a pricing calculator to get a personalized estimate.

To save on batch jobs and fault-tolerant workloads, Spot VMs are offered to reduce costs. Automatic discounts for sustained use are offered, or up to 70% off when signing up for committed use discounts.


Security controls and configurations

Encrypts data-in-use and while it’s being processed with Confidential VMs.

Defends against rootkits and bootkits with Shielded VMs.

Meets compliance standards for data residency, sovereignty, access, and encryption with Assured Workloads.


Google Compute Engine Features

Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) Features

  • Supported: Dynamic scaling
  • Supported: Elastic load balancing
  • Supported: Pre-configured templates
  • Supported: Pre-defined machine images
  • Supported: Operating system support
  • Supported: Security controls

Google Compute Engine Screenshots

Screenshot of How to choose the right VM
With thousands of applications, each with different requirements, which VM is right for you?Screenshot of documentation, guides, and reference architectures
Migration Center is Google Cloud's unified migration platform with features like cloud spend estimation, asset discovery, and a variety of tooling for different migration scenarios.

Google Compute Engine Videos

Compute Engine in 2 minutes
What is Compute Engine?

Google Compute Engine Technical Details

Deployment TypesSoftware as a Service (SaaS), Cloud, or Web-Based
Operating SystemsUnspecified
Mobile ApplicationNo

Frequently Asked Questions

Google Compute Engine is an infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) product from Google Cloud. It provides virtual machines with carbon-neutral infrastructure which run on the same data centers that Google itself uses.

Google Compute Engine starts at $0.

Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service) are common alternatives for Google Compute Engine.

Reviewers rate Dynamic scaling highest, with a score of 8.3.

The most common users of Google Compute Engine are from Small Businesses (1-50 employees).
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Comparisons

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Reviews and Ratings

(174)

Attribute Ratings

Reviews

(1-25 of 45)
Companies can't remove reviews or game the system. Here's why
Sagar Mehta | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use GCP (Google Cloud Platform) for following purposes:
- VM instances for Linux as well as Windows
- GKE Cluster for hosting self auto-scaling cluster running dynamic/multiple applications
- Multi-user project management
- Multiple projects hosted with separate IAM users
- Scaling Up/Down based on requirements of servers and applications.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
In our organization, we use Google Compute Engine (GCE) as central component of our cloud infrastructure. It provides us with scalable and flexible platform to sustain our virtual machines, which our applications run on, as well as storage and analytics capabilities. This tool helps us to address some business challenges like allows us easily to scale our resources up or down based on demand, ensuring that our applications remain permanent and available. Google Compute Engine greatly assists us in expanding or decreasing resources without worrying about sustaining it by ourselves. This has helped keeping our software running without interruption and with the highest performance.
Manan Soni | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Google Compute provides solutions to build dynamic websites and apps for clients without consuming much time. The tool has many features to build a customized apps according to our clients needs. It works on many programming languages and gives us option to build an app based on clients primary requirements.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Google Compute Engine (GCE) is the Infrastructure as a Service platform that we use for running workloads for different product/project teams. With GCE we can create custom VMs for different OS like Windows and different flavours of Linux. These VMs can support small/highly optimized configuration. GCE also provides us with ability to create high performance cloud storage spaces.
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Compute engine is an offering of GCP, it provides scalable and flexible virtual machine resources for organisations. Business Problem it addresses: Cost-Effectiveness Scalability Performance.

Google Compute Engine provides a high level of customization, flexibility, & scalability in contrast to this, storage is also a major role that it plays. Performance and Security are the Real Factors to go for the GCP Compute Engine




Manthan Dhola | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Google Compute Engine (GCE) to host and manage our applications and services in a scalable, reliable, and cost-effective manner. GCE helps us address business challenges related to scalability, reliability, performance, security, and cost-effectiveness. Our use case for GCE includes hosting web applications, running batch processing jobs, supporting machine learning tasks, and more, contributing to our organization's agility and innovation in the cloud.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
We use Google Compute Engine to host websites and APIs for small businesses. It lets us adjust resources based on how much traffic our clients get, making sure their sites and apps run smoothly without them needing to deal with server management. We pick different types of virtual machines depending on what each client needs, e.g a simple blog or an online store.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Google Compute Engine instances as our main servers to host our services and applications that are externally or internally used across the whole company. They are easy to use, configure, replicate, update, secure the machines, etc.

Currently, we face no problems with this service and everything is working more than fine.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use it for cross platform software testing and its performance, earlier we were using VM Ware for the same but because Google Compute Engine grants you with more features to increase/decrease the core capabilities of the OS involved for the application testing, we are able to do regression testings more efficiently.

It helped us in identifying the key lacking areas/bugs during the initials phases of a product development.
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
A scalable and flexible setup to quickly get our apps up and running without dropping tons of cash upfront, paying only for what we actually use with that pay-as-you-go thing and resources automatically scaling to match demand. High availability comes baked in through load balancing across Google's global infrastructure, with security features and custom VM configs letting us tailor things to our app's needs. With growth, it is possible to integrate with Google's full suite of cloud services like analytics, machine learning, serverless, etc. - to keep adding on capabilities while still focusing on building cool stuff instead of dealing with infrastructure headaches. Comparable to AWS EC2.
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
In our company, we primarily use Google Compute Engine to create VM instances that would power our website our testing environment and as a CI/CD tool.
The main purpose that help us decided to use Google Compute Engine was the cost and the ability to easily scale our instances to our needs.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Google Compute Engine to run jenkins. This jenkins jobs do various tasks.
- Building products
- Running integration test
- Running accreditations tests
Before every release we set up a production grade deployment using Google Compute Engine and do performance test.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
We use it for microservices that has burst processing demands - they require lots of processing power for very short periods of time, thus requiring powerful hardware that, for most of the time, goes on without use. We wanted a cloud solution to avoid the hardware and infrastructure inherent to that scenario.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Most development servers and build machines are migrating into Google Cloud Compute engine. This allows us to spin up/down resources on demand based on workload, product needs, etc. QA does the same for testing resources.
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
My company uses Google Compute Engine to clean our "dirty" EDI files from the ports, terminals, and carriers that we work with for data cleansing services. We then put the cleansed files back into our dashboards for better visibility and to show potentially actionable insights for our customers.
Ye Yint Moe | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
I have used Google Compute Engine for testing and deploying SAP
S/4 Hana appliance for the internal training and learning purpose in Google cloud platform environment.
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We are using GCE to prototype new projects at scale for our customers. Unlike on premise infrastructure we can create servers at a moments notice and limited to just the timespan required. This saves us having to procure servers from our partnered procurement organisations which typically has a much longer lead time and hugely improves the overall time it takes to start a project.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Our specific department uses google cloud for its data analytics capabilities but also for its scalable and flexible virtual/compute infrastructure. We have some large jobs that we will provision ad-hoc compute to assist as needed. Google Compute Engine excels in this area and has never failed us.
Manjeet Singh | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Google Compute Engine is being used across the company for all of the server needs. It lets us create VMs with a variety of customizable options. It does give us a predefined set of VMs that can be directly used based on needs. It also helps us to reduce the cost by using the right size of VMs.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Google Compute Engine to support almost all of our in house computer. We have a web application that has a distributed backend of various workloads, all of which run on Compute Engine. Some of these workloads are even containerized. These workloads support the whole organization and provide analysis for research and development.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Google Compute Engine across the organization along with other Google Cloud Platform Services. We have interconnected collections of Google Cloud Platform Services which include among these sets of services components deployed on the Google Compute Engine, which act as the backbone of multiple customer facing production deployments.<br><br>To be more precise we have one product which is a web app for monitoring and prediction of household energy consumption and household solar panel power generation. To implement this on GCP we are using numerous GCP services including Google Compute Engine but not limited only to GCE.<br><br>Additionally, we have another product which focuses on voltage optimization primarily for the purpose of conservation voltage reduction at a particular customer site (e.g. a substation controlling a factory, school, large building or facility, etc). The voltage optimization consists primarily of monitoring sensors and performing a near real-time prediction and optimization, and then providing recommended voltage levels for an OLTC controller. This particular deployment must occasionally be deployed on-site, however we also support production level cloud deployment. The cloud deployment will use Google Compute Engine to host a Docker environment, that mirrors the Docker environment that we set up on the machines for the onsite deployments. <br><br>We also use Google Compute engine in a number of prototype builds for testing the efficacy of data science and machine learning models and as a platform for quick collaboration during remote work. Though the number of such deployments are myriad, hence I will forgo the details.<br><br><br><br><br><br><br><br><br>
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
For hybrid cloud solution we decided to use the separated cloud provider as a DR (pilot light model) in our project. Compute Engine was created in one Region with general purpose machine family. The project requirements were set - one of the first priorities - cloud provider independence.
October 28, 2019

Great Service

Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Google Compute Engine to host a variety of services including proxy servers, small websites, and peripheral services. Additionally, we make use of the Google Compute Engine to quickly spin up instances for testing and experimentation and then destroy them once finished without incurring a lot of costs, both money and time.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Google Compute Engine (GCE) is used for most of the AI workload spanning both on-prem private cloud and public cloud. It is used for both onetime training phase for our Deep Learning workload as well as ongoing Deep Learning inference for customer facing applications.
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