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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

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  • Security controls (46)
    7.3
    73%
  • Operating system support (46)
    7.2
    72%
  • Pre-defined machine images (45)
    6.2
    62%
  • Pre-configured templates (44)
    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

(176)

Attribute Ratings

Reviews

(1-24 of 24)
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Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We are using the compute engine to host our web applications frontend and backend, with jaeger for tracing of api calls from backend. We also are using Grafana monitoring tool for monitoring and observability of our gen ai chatbots metric in other vm. The best about it is the ease to create and configure the vm. Configuration of firewall from ui is very easy which is helpful.
  • configuration of firewall from ui is very easy.
  • can change the name of VM. Sometime the default name got saved which is very confusing, so we can change the VM name after stop it.
  • addition of extra disk space can be done in few clicks.
  • I got discount on VM original price.
  • I find the documentation a lit bit hard to understand for few times.
  • It will be good if I can change the VM name without stopping it.
  • Sometime the SSH feels slow and looks like its lagging.
Its best suited if we are working with other google services, the integration of it with other google services is very easy to implement. If you are using other cloud services then the integration can get little hard, and may find some error due to different cloud platform. Its perform is good with google services.
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.
  • Multiple Web Apps Options
  • Prebuilt Samples
  • Customization
  • Documentation For First Time Users
  • More Implementation Would be Handy
Google Compute Engine is so easy to implement and run. It doesn't require much knowledge to build an app since they provide multiple options to choose from with their prebuilt sample list. We can easily make customization on any website app we built for our client according to their needs and make changes if required.
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




  • Web and Application Hosting
  • High Performance Computing
  • Security, One can rely on Security related things if we are preferring Compute Engine.
  • Ease of Use
  • Pricing
  • Configuring Network & Setting up of VPC and all can be Improved.
I will recommend the Compute Engine if we are concerned of Security, Flexibility and Scalabilty but, It can be improved a bit more in terms of Ease of Usage as compared to AWS EC2 or Azure VM.

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.
  • Scalability and Flexibility - during peak hours or sudden spikes in traffic to our website, GCE automatically provisions additional virtual machine instances to handle the increased load.
  • Global Network Infrastructure - we can deploy multi-region architectures with ease, distributing workloads across multiple regions for improved redundancy and performance.
  • Advanced Security Features - encryption at rest and in transit, identity and access management (IAM) controls, network firewalls, and distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) protection
  • Costing - more visibility over how costing is calculated
  • More pre-configured templates like AWS has cloudformation
  • Advanced Monitoring Tools are needed
Suited -Batch Processing and Data Analytics, Web Application Hosting, Containerized Workloads, high performance computing
Unsuited - low traffic websites, static websites, legacy applications, small scale web apps
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.
  • Scaling - whether it's traffic spikes or just steady growth, Google Compute Engine's auto-scaling makes sure we've got the compute power we need without any manual juggling acts
  • Load balancing - Keeping things smooth with that load balancing across multiple VMs, so our users don't have to deal with slow load times or downtime even when things get crazy busy
  • Customizability - Mix and match configs for CPU, RAM, storage and whatnot to suit our specific app needs
  • The pricing model can get a bit convoluted at times
  • While the integration with other Google Cloud services is pretty slick, linking up Google Compute Engine with services outside of Google's ecosystem isn't always smooth sailing
  • The learning curve for more advanced Google Compute Engine features can be pretty steep at times
If your startup has a web app or SaaS offering that needs to scale quickly based on user demand, Google Compute Engine's auto-scaling capabilities make it a great fit. You can easily spin up more VMs during traffic spikes without overprovisioning resources. For data-intensive workloads like big data processing or training machine learning models, Google Compute Engine's flexible compute instances with GPU support can provide cost-effective scalability. If you have a short-term project or MVP with minimal scaling needs, the overhead of setting up Google Compute Engine may not be worth it.
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.
  • Fast
  • Great CLI
  • Great APIs
  • gcloud CLI is very broad
  • Billing detail could get more finer grained
It's Google! Always strong for devs and engineers. Cost, seemingly cheaper than Azure and AWS, yes. In practice, who knows. Their APIs and CLI are strong enough to ensure this is definitely an 8 in recommendation.
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.
  • Auto Scaling
  • Flexible Instance Sizes
  • Easy to understand pricing model
  • More inside the UI advanced capabilities would be nice
  • Customer is currently forced to learn the CLI to do advanced functions / scripting
  • Stability is just not the same as other cloud providers in our experience.
We use Google Compute Engine in a hybrid and multi-cloud solution. We find that using it for direct ad-hoc use cases meets all of our demands. We have attempted some more complex networking and multi-regional use cases but were not able to achieve satisfactory results. Google Compute Engine is extremely appropriate for anyone requiring quick, scalable, reliable infrastructure.
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.
  • It's very easy to spin up a VM from the console. We can say the console is very user-friendly.
  • Set of predefined VMs ready to be used for different needs.
  • Options of preemptible VMs which help reduce the considerable amount of cost.
  • Spin up takes some time and that's where containers come into the picture.
  • Setting up security for created VMs is still messy and it can be simpler.
GCE is well suited for the following scenarios. GCE is very easy to use, and we can navigate on the console easily for trying various options. Reasonable pricing for the VMs help to reduce the overall budget. Recommendations for running VMs to scale up or down. Set of predefined VM types. Preemptible instances.
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.
  • It can run containers.
  • It is completely flexible in terms of CPU, memory, etc.
  • It's APIs are useful for spinning up machines computationally.
  • Running multiple containers on one VM.
Google Compute Engine is suitable for any scenario that fits one of the pros I listed. It is very flexible and easily configurable. In many cases, VMs need to be spun up on the fly programmatically, and without orchestration software, one can accomplish this by using one of the APIs.
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>
  • It is easy to use
  • It is easy to setup
  • Configuration and monitoring of the instances is straightforward and thorough
  • The configuration of ingress and egress for the nodes could be easier
  • Machine image storing, compression, etc. could be better or have more functionality
  • Transferring machine images to and from my local environment is something I have wanted on GCE and its competitors for a long time
I have recommended the platform to students, friends and family members alike. The help and documentation is very easy to follow for a beginner. Plus, GCP has built in tools which make some common tasks that non-production level cloud users need to accomplish very easy in an automated way.

Now, to address the question of recommending GCE to a colleague, ultimately the organization will have to make a decision regarding the entire cloud platform. It wouldn't make much sense, outside of a special case, to use GCE for some parts of your cloud infrastructure and a competitor on other parts.

That practical caveat aside, I believe that the GCP brings a strong suite of tools to the table overall and is good value for money at this time as well.

Developer familiarity to certain competing platforms can be a sticking point, but a colleague who is already asking for a recommendation is likely already open minded about moving to GCP.
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.
  • East interface to scale up and down the compute capacity
  • Easy, straight forward billing and chargeback capabilities
  • Reliability / uptime is great and had no issues so far on uptime
  • Works well in multi cloud environments
  • Although not always used, there is room for adding more detailed and granular management console when things go wrong (and sometime they do)
  • Documentation can sometime be hard to find especially for using GCE for time critical, large scale deployments
  • There are also some compatibility issues when running custom libraries over GCE. Support for third party drivers and libraries can be improved.
GCE is very well suited to small to mid scale deployments. It is also run very well with AI workloads especially when using Google TenserFlow et al. It is less appropriate for extremest scale deployments that spam multiple data center (probably because of lack of document on best practices)
Brendon Brown | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Google Compute Engine for staging deployments in the web development department. We are operating off an external assessment that competitor services offer better pricing on production units, so we've agreed to keep Compute Engine in a low tier staging system only. We have yet to do our own audit from an internal efficiency perspective, and how that will impact pricing assessments.
  • Compute Engine is gaining traction, and documentation is getting easier to find.
  • Menus and services are structured more intelligently.
  • The idea of poor Support from the Google brand prevents my technicians from picking up the phone.
  • It's easier to find EC2 experts to consult and support mission-critical operations.
In my opinion, most cloud applications should consider Google Compute Engine from a speed and pricing perspective. Of course, you should do an assessment based on what your application needs to do and how it needs to perform, but there's a machine for most kinds of deployments. If you have the expertise nearby, all the better.
Tristan Dobbs | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
ResellerIncentivized
We use compute engine across a number of departments at our company. We deploy temporary workloads to VMs on a daily basis and have deployed our production systems to GCE for deployment and CI/CD pipelines, ETL for data projects, and for large-scale customer engineering.
GCE is in play primarily for our engineering department as well as our customer engineering and sales teams.
  • GCE is excellent at cost management. We are able to manage billing to the second and set up rules to manage those expenses easily.
  • GCE is fast! Our teams constantly provision/de-provision workloads and GCE is able to keep up well, no matter the type or number of servers that need to be spun up.
  • The configuration is extremely easy. The UI is being improved and tweaked on a regular basis to keep up with UI/UX trends and make it easy for users to do everything from the console. That said, the API is extensive and powerful. Many of us prefer the CLI for bulk actions.
  • Windows management is lacking. When managing a Windows machine, it's nearly always necessary to RDP into the machine and an agent would be very helpful for system-level API calls.
  • Stackdriver integration could be rolled out better. We would like to see more standard monitoring functionality and metrics built-in for instant deployment when using a new project.
  • Inter-project organization. It's difficult to connect different GCP projects in order to share a VPC. Once that is complete, it's nearly impossible to extricate them.
GCE is so customizable and extensible that it can fit most use cases and applications. Costs are excellent and it has become the most useful tool in our collection to deploy products, test scenarios, migrate workloads, and move out of the "server room". Ease of management cost control and customization are the biggest wins with GCE.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
The big advantage of using Google Computer Engine is that pricing is much less than if you bought your own hardware. You are only paying for what you need, there's no over-spend required for redundant systems. Google Compute Engine is one of the best IaaS cloud solution at the moment.

  • Provides resizable compute capacity
  • Great scalability and elasticity
  • Very customizable
  • Generous free tier
  • Some loading issues
  • Setup can be tricky
  • No other problems
You can use Google’s web services to build a highly customized solution to meet all your company’s needs. Very easy to build, test, deploy and manage applications and services though their data centers. Google Compute Engine gives you the freedom to move away from having your servers based on premises which can reduce costs.
June 29, 2019

Google delivers

Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Google Compute Engine is used by the DevOps team for hosted Windows servers. This alleviates countless concerns with having a server on-site, and is very comparable to other hosting providers.
  • We are able to select a custom amount of vCPU and Memory resources.
  • It provides pricing estimates on the page when configuring a new instance (versus having to reference separate documentation).
  • We are able to tie into G-Suite User Directory for access control to the Google Compute Engine console.
  • It would be nice to move a Google Compute Engine Server to a different project without having to recreate it.
Google Compute Engine is very similar to AWS EC2, and in most of the same regions, but also in a couple of additional geographic locations. So if proximity is crucial, there are some additional options with GCE over AWS EC2.
Fedor Paretsky | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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.
Tyler Johnson | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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.
Dmitry Sadovnychyi | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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.
Raymond Hawkins | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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.
Andy Zhang | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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.
David Long, SPA | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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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