Item: Google Compute Engine
Rating: 8
Author: Verified User

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

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.

Pros and Cons

Runs various operating systems. It also does the patch management of those OS
Virtual Manager allows management of OS
Provides high performance block storage
Provides global load balancing

Subnetworks are not supported
Support is quite expensive
The user interface can be complex for a first time user

Return on Investment

Lowers total cost of ownership
Flexible way to add additional compute intensive resources thus improving performance
Supports multiple OS images thus making easy to make right technology choices
No patch management. The OS are automatically patch managed.

Performance

GCE is a performant infrastructure. The GCE usage reports are readily available and the reports load time is insignificant. GCE exposes various REST API which allows the third part system to integrate with GCE. Many observability software like newRelic integrates with the GCE to offer monitoring of GCE

Reliability and Availability

GCE is highly available system. So far we have not experienced any planned or unplanned outages. We do experience application errors however they are not GCE reated. GCE provides us with wide ranges of option to make systems highly available like block storage, global load balancing, GPU accelerators and Machine Managers which manages different VMs.

Alternatives Considered

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)

GCE is available in 3 different regions whereas Ec2 is available in 11 different regions. The compute resources offered by the GCE has lower maximum capacity compared to AWS Ec2. The pricing model of GCE offers first 10 mins free and then charging in increments of 10 mins.
Both Ec2 and GCE offers high CPU/high memory and standard images

Key Insights

Do you think Google Compute Engine delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with Google Compute Engine's feature set?

Yes

Did Google Compute Engine live up to sales and marketing promises?

I wasn't involved with the selection/purchase process

Did implementation of Google Compute Engine go as expected?

I wasn't involved with the implementation phase

Would you buy Google Compute Engine again?

Yes

Other Software Used

GitLab, IntelliJ IDEA, Docker, PyCharm

Likelihood to Recommend

Google Compute Engine (GCE) is well suited adding cloud storage. GCE provides excellent block storage capabilities and is well suited for adding addition storage to the application. The applications can be globally load balanced across different regions thus maintaining high availability and response times. It supports VMs of different operating systems thus enabling correct infrastructural choices. GCE UI is not very user friendly can can be improved. Also the networking setup is not very intuitive.

Google Compute Engine Review

Overall Satisfaction with Google Compute Engine