Developer]
Last year, Google unveiled Compute Engine at Google I/O, apparently looking to compete with Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure for the cloud computing needs of companies.
In May, Google made it available for every person, and added sub-hour billing charges for instances in a single-minute increments, shared-core instances, advanced routing features and disk support for as much as 10 terabytes per volume.
Today, Google announced general availability with a 99.95% monthly SLA and 24/7 support, and has launched support for Red Hat, SUSE, FreeBSD, and all other Linux variants.
They’ve also added three new 16-core instance types in limited preview.
Google has also lowered prices for normal instances by 10% in all regions.
“You now have virtual machines that experience the performance, reliability, security and scale of Google’s own infrastructure,” says Greg DeMichillie, director of product management.
“At Google, we’ve found that regular maintenance of hardware and software infrastructure is significant to operating with a high level of reliability, security and function,” says VP, Cloud Platform, Ari Balogh. “We’re introducing transparent maintenance that mixes software and knowledge center innovations with live migration technology to accomplish proactive maintenance while your virtual machines keep running. You currently get all of the benefits of normal updates and proactive maintenance without the downtime and reboots typically required. Furthermore, within the event of a failure, we automatically restart your VMs and get them back online in minutes. We’ve already rolled out this option to our US zones, with others to follow within the coming months.”
“Building highly scalable and reliable applications starts with using the proper storage,” he says. “Our Persistent Disk service provide you with strong, consistent performance in addition to much higher durability than local disks. Today we’re lowering the cost of Persistent Disk by 60% per Gigabyte and dropping I/O charges so you get a predictable, low cost in your block storage device. I/O available to a volume scales linearly with size, and the biggest Persistent Disk volumes have as much as 700% higher peak I/O capability.”
More on Persistent Disk here.
Google counts Snapchat, Cooladata, Mendelics, Evite and Wix among its current Compute Engine customers. With today’s announcement, more businesses of all sizes can climb aboard.
Image: Google