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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 (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

(26-47 of 47)
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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.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Google Compute Engine is used for a variety of workloads. Its use is growing as larger parts of the organization start embracing cloud computing.
  • Internal applications.
  • Tools.
  • QA and testing environments.
  • Production deployment.
  • Experimentation with new technologies.
  • Migration from datacenter to cloud environments.
  • Training environments (they can be easily created and then deleted after the training).
  • Business processing.
  • Data processing and pipelines (in combination with various other products available in Google Compute Platform (GCP).
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.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Using Google Compute Engine, you can manage your costs. It helps to avoid the high costs of buying hardware and setting up a new server infrastructure on your physical location. Also, Google Computer Engine offers you the possibility of accessing your files and data with higher security, and save days worth of time spent on setup and installation. We migrated from hardware to visualized servers hosted to Google Compute Engine. We made Windows and Linux servers and hostel our core-services: ERP, accounting, marketing app.
Thomas Young | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Google Cloud Compute Engine is used by the organization to do automated advanced analytics for clients across the world. The software addresses two important aspects of our business: first, it runs in the background and with speed and accuracy that works well for the analyst as well as others; second, the software runs in the cloud, which makes analyzing the data generally easier.
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.
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.

Vinicius Lima | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Google Compute Engine as IaaS provider across the whole organization. Almost all of our servers are deployed in this environment. We also help some of our customers to deploy virtual machines due to our expertise in cloud computing. We think it is a reliable platform that delivers everything we need regarding IaaS.
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.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Compute Engine for one of our main consumer and business products. We have a globally distributed infrastructure for this. I believe we are using almost all the features/functionalities offered by GCE. e.g Instance, groups/templates with full rolling updates capability coupled with CI/CD. We also host part of our monitoring systems in GCE. Other than that, some other teams are on the POC phase for some critical backend products as well. Moreover, we experiment with some of our machine learning on Compute Engine. The benefit we get by using GCE is the combination of the autoscaling, rolling updates, preemptability, and global network.
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.
August 17, 2018

Google does it right

Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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
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.
Sazzad Hossain Sharkar | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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