Google Compute Engine enables users (utilising authentication based on OAuth 2.0) to launch virtual machines (VMs) on demand.
Google Compute Engine can be accessed via the Developer Console, RESTful API or command-line interface (CLI).
[2] During Google I/O 2013, many features including sub-hour billing, shared-core instance types, larger persistent disks, enhanced SDN based networking capabilities and ISO/IEC 27001 certification got announced.
According to Google, 2.75 GCEUs represent the minimum power of one logical core (a hardware hyper-thread) based on the Sandy Bridge platform.
The GCEU was created by Anthony F. Voellm out of a need to compare the performance of virtual machines offered by Google.
By default, Google Compute Engine uses SCSI for attaching persistent disks.
Google Compute Engine uses KVM as the hypervisor,[4] and supports guest images running Linux and Microsoft Windows which are used to launch virtual machines based on the 64 bit x86 architecture.
The number of virtual CPUs, amount of memory supported by the VM is dependent on the machine type selected.
Once an instance is run for over 25% of a billing cycle, the price starts to drop: Google provides certain types of machine: The prices mentioned below[5] are based on running standard Debian or CentOS Linux virtual machines (VMs).
Compute Engine connects various entities called resources that will be a part of the deployment.
All information stored on the persistent disks is encrypted before being written to physical media, and the keys are tightly controlled by Google.
This is especially useful for creating backups of the persistent disk data in cases of unexpected failures and zone maintenance events.
A Google Compute Engine instance is a virtual machine running on a Linux or Microsoft Windows configuration.
Users can choose to modify the instances including customizing the hardware, OS, disk, and other configuration options.
GCE also provides mechanism to reserve and attach static IPs to the VMs.
Similar to a physical router in the local area network, all outbound traffic is compared to the routes table and forwarded appropriately if the outbound packet matches any rules in the routes table.
The table below summarises the scope of GCE resources: Google charges the VMs for a minimum of 10 minutes.
[8][9] Users need not pay a commitment fee upfront to get discounts on the regular, on-demand pricing.
Compute Engine VMs boot within 30 seconds[10] which is considered to be 4-10x faster than the competition.
[12] Images and disk snapshots belong to the global scope which means they are implicitly available across all the regions and zones of Google Cloud Platform.
During the scheduled maintenance of Google data center, Compute Engine can automatically migrate the VMs from one host to the other without involving any action from the users.