Google Ramps up Cloud Efforts as Compute Engine Matures

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You can now add another name to the list of vendors that offers a production-grade Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud platform. Google officially announced late Monday that its Compute Engine is now Generally Available and ready for mission critical workloads.

The Google Compute Engine was first launched as public beta by Google in June 2012. When Google first announced the Compute Engine in 2012, the platform only supported the Debian and CentOS Linux distributions. Now that Compute Engine is generally available, support is expanding to including SUSE Linux as well as FreeBSD. There is also a limited preview of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL).

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Going a step further, Google is now also providing new virtualization options on the platform, including support for the Docker container technology.

The actual virtual machine instances that Google offers with Compute Engine are also getting a boost with new options. Compute Engine offers standard machine types which have previously been available in 1, 2, 4, and 8 CPU configurations. Google is now expanding that offering to include a new 16 CPU version. The standard machine type configuration for the new 16 CPU instance include up to 30 GB of memory. There is is new high memory machine type for the 16 CPU instance that can provide up to 104 GB of memory.

Pricing

The General Availability of Google’s Compute Engine also involves a set of price reductions. Google is now lowering Compute Engine pricing for virtual instance by 10 percent. The 1 CPU entry level standard virtual machine now costs $0.104 per hour, while the new 16 CPU standard virtual machine will set users back $1.659 per hour.

Google is also lowering the associated storage costs for its cloud platform

“Today we’re lowering the price of Persistent Disk by 60 percent per Gigabyte and dropping I/O charges so that you get a predictable, low price for your block storage device,”Ari Balogh, Vice President at Google, wrote in a blog post. ” I/O available to a volume scales linearly with size, and the largest Persistent Disk volumes have up to 700 percent higher peak I/O capability”.

The Google Compute Engine isn’t Google’s first foray into the realm of cloud services. Back in 2008, Google launched its App Engine initiative in beta as a nascent Platform-as-a-Service. App Engine for business, which is a more enterprise focused version of App Engine, was announced back in 2010.

Today both App Engine and Compute Engine are part of the Google Cloud Platform, which also includes Cloud SQL, storage and Big Data services.

Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at Datamation and InternetNews.com. Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist

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