Google Compute Engine Reaches General Availability

google-coldaisle

Inside the cold aisle of a Google data center. Consumers can now run applications on Google's infrastructure using Google Compute Engine.

A year after launching its cloud platform, Google has announced the general availability of Google Compute Engine, and added several new features and lower prices for persistent disks and popular compute instances. After a year in preview, Google Compute Engine is now backed by the vast Google infrastructure and data center footprint, and features 24/7 support and a service-level agreement (SLA) offering 99.95 percent uptime. Google is also introducing what it calls transparent maintenance, that combines software and data center innovations with live migration technology to perform proactive maintenance while virtual machines keep running.

Three new 16-core instances are being launched in preview mode, featuring up to 16 cores and 104 gigabytes of RAM. They are available in the familiar standard, high-memory and high-CPU shapes. After launching with support for just two Linux distributions, Compute Engine now runs on any out-of-the-box Linux distribution. In limited preview it will also support SUSE, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and FreeBSD.

Enhancing its storage for the cloud platform, Google has lowered the price of Persistent Disk by 60 percent per Gigabyte and dropped I/O charges for a predictable, low price for a block storage device. I/O available to a volume scales linearly with size, and the largest Persistent Disk volumes have up to 700% higher peak I/O capability.  Google also said that it is lowering prices on popular standard Compute Engine instances by 10 percent in all regions.

“We find that Compute Engine scales quickly, allowing us to easily meet the flow of new sequencing requests," said David Schlesinger, CEO of Mendelics.  "Compute Engine has helped us scale with our demands and has been a key component to helping our physicians diagnose and cure genetic diseases in Brazil and around the world.”

"Google Cloud Platform provides the most consistent performance we’ve ever seen," said Sebastian Stadil, CEO of Scalr. "Every VM, every disk, performs exactly as we expect it to and gave us the ability to build fast, low-latency applications."