Item: Google Compute Engine
Rating: 10
Author: Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Google Compute Engine

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Google Compute Engine to spin up small development environments that host our development and staging Postgres database instances. We didn't want to have to use a more fully featured SQL solution like Google Cloud SQL or other major solutions for development/staging to cut down on cloud-related costs.

Pros and Cons

Pros

Can spin up very small instances
Instances can be paused
Instances can set up with a Docker image

Cons

It'd be nice to be able to set up auto pausing in the console
On that note, instances can be suspended only up to 60 days, it'd be nice if it went longer or indefinitely

Return on Investment

Highly reduced costs for small and pause-able tasks

Performance

Does exactly what you expect! The Google Compute Engine machine types have performance according to the chosen specs, and the console itself is quite responsive. It's a little slow to perform actions like suspending and booting instances, so that would be only reason I would reduce marks, but I'd say the ease of use otherwise outweighs that.

Reliability and Availability

I've never had issues with Google Compute Engine's availability.

Alternatives Considered

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)

I find Google Compute Engine to be much easier to use than Amazon's EC2 service. The console makes much more sense, permission management is much cleaner, and I'd say the other categories feel on par with EC2: performance, how fine-grained the settings are, connecting to instances, scalability, reliability of instances, etc. In EC2 I felt like I would consistently get lost in the console or need to look up documentation.

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?

Yes

Did implementation of Google Compute Engine go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Google Compute Engine again?

Yes

Other Software Used

Google Cloud SQL, Google Cloud Run, CircleCI, Netlify Platform

Likelihood to Recommend

Google Compute Engine is perfectly suited to the more ad hoc tasks you might need a machine for. We use it for development/staging environments specifically, but it's great for running various tasks in isolation and having great control over how much it's going to cost you. Auto-pausing also helps greatly in this area.

Google Compute Engine Feature Ratings

Comments

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Great service for ad-hoc tasks