Google Cloud Launches Single-Tenant Servers in Beta

Google Cloud Platform is introducing a single-tenant server option for users that might find it useful in complying with company policy or regulations, according to a Thursday blog post.

Now in beta, the “sole-tenant node” service offers clients the option to reserve hardware inside Google’s cloud data centers and choose to launch their cloud VMs on that hardware. The same management tools and pricing schemes, such as sustained-use discounts, apply, but GCP adds a 10 percent premium to the regular cloud VM price for sole tenancy.

This is not a bare-metal cloud service. Each sole-tenant node comes with a hypervisor, ready for deployment of one or multiple single-client VMs.

Microsoft Azure, the second-largest cloud infrastructure service provider, offers large memory-optimized G5-series virtual machines and D15 v2 instances that run on dedicated single-customer hardware. Those appear to be the only two single-tenant options in Azure, but they each provide a single VM per physical host for memory-intensive applications.

Google’s new offering is closer to the Dedicated Hosts and Dedicated Instances options offered by market leader Amazon Web Services. Like GCP, AWS offers clients dedicated physical hardware they can deploy cloud VMs on.

Besides compliance benefits, AWS pitches Dedicated Hosts to customers that want to use their existing server-bound software licenses by providing control over how exactly a VM instance is placed on a physical host.

Related:Google Launches Bare-Metal Cloud GPUs for Machine Learning