High Performance, Scalable Cloud Computing with Seamless Integration with other Google Services.
Google Compute Engine is very affordable, user friendly and has AI capabilities so to me, it is superior to AWS in every aspect. And its …
Starting at $0 per month GB
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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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Popular Features
- Security controls (46)7.373%
- Operating system support (46)7.272%
- Pre-defined machine images (45)6.262%
- Pre-configured templates (44)5.858%
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Pricing
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
Product Demos
Google Compute Engine Load Balancing, a quick introduction
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Computing with Google Compute Engine
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RouterOS CHR deployment in Google Compute Engine (GCE) demo
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Creating Custom Images for Google Compute Engine
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Hands on with Load Balancing on Google Compute Engine
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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
Google Compute Engine Videos
Compute Engine in 2 minutes
What is Compute Engine?
Google Compute Engine Competitors
Google Compute Engine Technical Details
| Deployment Types | Software as a Service (SaaS), Cloud, or Web-Based |
|---|---|
| Operating Systems | Unspecified |
| Mobile Application | No |
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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Reviews and Ratings
(176)Attribute Ratings
Reviews
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October 28, 2019
Great Service
- GCE is well suited for multi-environment testing, development, and experimentation.
- Very cost effective.
- If you want to do something outside of a standard image it can be a little cumbersome.
October 04, 2019
Best in breed mid market cloud compute: GCE
- 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.
September 28, 2019
The Foundation for Cloud Processing
- Easy and fast creation of the resource.
- Rich ecosystem of tools and cloud technologies.
- Ability to scale up and down, based on the needs.
- Better documentation.
- Up to date documentation.
- Capabilities on par with AWS.
August 23, 2019
Google Cloud Engine -- a cost-benefit comparison is sorely needed. Because everything else is there.
- 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.
August 20, 2019
Excelent cloud solution
- Access files and data with higher security.
- Easy to manage.
- Create virtual machines very easily.
- Google Compute Engine is user-friendly.
- The price is good.
- Documentation can be more detailed.
- More costs options.
- No other recommendations.
August 19, 2019
Google's Compute Engine is Good if You Like the Google Ecosystem, and Probably Even if You Don't Like Google
- Google Cloud Compute Engine does a good job at crunching numbers.
- Google Cloud Compute Engine is great at always being available, and I have yet to find any latency.
- Google Cloud Compute Engine is great for doing advanced analytics (machine learning) without needing the software on my desktop.
- Google Compute Engine is in the cloud, which means that it is probably less secure than on-premise options. With that said, I have never had a problem.
- Google Compute Engine seems fine at running machine learning models, but is in no way as good as competing tools that are not run in the cloud.
- Google Compute Engine is less user friendly than AWS or Azure, at least that's my experience.
August 16, 2019
Ease to start, easy to maintain
- 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.
August 16, 2019
The best cloud solution
- Provides resizable compute capacity
- Great scalability and elasticity
- Very customizable
- Generous free tier
- Some loading issues
- Setup can be tricky
- No other problems
August 12, 2019
Reliable and user-friendly IaaS platform
- A friendly and intuitive graphical interface is available
- There are several resources available, such as networking and snapshots.
- The performance is amazing and you can select the region/zone close to your region.
- There is a shell environment that helps a lot
- Better price for Windows Server virtual machines
- The graphical interface to manage a specific VM could be improved.
June 29, 2019
Google delivers
- 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.
May 24, 2019
Host scalable and globally distrubuted compute systems to get best value for money in cloud
- Advanced autoscaling logic to cater scenarios that involve high load at the global level.
- Seamless and reliable rolling updates with support for releases.
- Backup data via very fast snapshots helps to quickly back up systems
- Good support for things like metadata (pre-defined and custom).
- Ability use Windows client OS VMs (or support import capability)
- Increase the offered default monitoring metrics set.
- Adjustable shutdown cooldown period (instead of fixed 30 seconds window).
- 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.
August 17, 2018
Google does it right
- 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
- 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.
October 11, 2017
My two years experience with Google Compute Engine
- 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.
- 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
- 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.
March 29, 2017
Wonderful IaaS for small businesses with room to grow
- 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.
March 24, 2017
GCE - the underrated underdog of the market
- 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
February 24, 2017
Google Compute Engine: The ONLY choice for cloud computing
- 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.
September 21, 2016
Benefits of Google Cloud for bespoke green-field applications
- 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.
April 11, 2016
Google Compute Engine Review
- UNIX-style command line tools
- Web-based console panel
- Persistent disks
- Web console is a bit slow