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Google
Compute Engine
Copyright 2019, Faulkner Information Services. All Rights Reserved.
Docid: 00021379
Publication Date: 1907
Report Type: PRODUCT
Preview
The Google Compute Engine is an
Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) product that offers flexible, self-managed
virtual machines on the vendor’s infrastructure. The service integrates with
other Google Cloud platform technologies such as Google Cloud Storage, Google App Engine, and
Google BigQuery to enable users to create
more complex and sophisticated applications. Google is leveraging its
considerable infrastructure assets, which until now have been dedicated to the
company’s Internet search business and other
properties, to become a major pubic cloud space IaaS provider.
Report Contents:
- Description
- Related Faulkner Reports
- Vendor
- Applications
- Environment
- Support
- Pricing
- Competitors
- Web Links
Description
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First offered in December 2013, the Google Compute Engine is an
Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) product that offers flexible, self-managed
virtual machines on the vendor’s infrastructure. The service integrates with
other Google Cloud platform technologies such as Google Cloud Storage, Google App Engine, and
Google BigQuery to enable users to create
more complex and sophisticated applications.
Google is leveraging its
considerable infrastructure assets, which until now have been dedicated to the
company’s Internet search business and other
properties, to become a major pubic cloud space IaaS provider.
With the Compute Engine, Google is now positioned to compete with offerings from
its major Web rivals: Amazon, which provides Amazon Web Services; and Microsoft,
which provides Microsoft Azure.
The Google Compute Engine allows developers to architect applications with
both managed and unmanaged services that run on Google’s infrastructure.
Service Availability
According to the latest Google Compute Engine Service Level Agreement, issued
March 28, 2019, Google "will provide a Monthly Uptime Percentage … of at least 99.99
percent." If Google does not satisfy this service level objective, a customer will
be eligible to receive appropriate financial credits.
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Security & Privacy
All data written to persistent disk is encrypted on the fly
and then transmitted and stored in encrypted form. Google Compute Engine has
completed ISO 27001, SSAE-16, SOC 1, SOC 2, and SOC 3 certifications,
demonstrating a commitment to information security.
Basic Capabilities
With the Google Compute Engine, developers can:
Utilize Predefined Machine Types – Compute Engine offers predefined virtual machine configurations for every need
from micro instances to instances with up to 160 vCPUs and 3.75TB of memory.
Create Custom Machine Types
–
Customers can create
virtual machines with the shape (i.e., vCPU and memory) that is right for their
workloads. thus helping realize significant savings.
Attach Persistent Disks
– Network
storage, up to 64 TB in size, can be attached to VMs as persistent disks. If a VM instance is
terminated, its persistent disk retains data and can be attached to another
instance.
Utilize Local SSD
– Compute Engine
offers always-encrypted local solid-state drive (SSD) block storage. Local SSDs
up to 3TB are available for any VM with at least 1 vCPU.
Leverage Global Load Balancing
– Global load-balancing technology helps customers distribute incoming requests across pools of
instances across multiple regions, helping achieve maximum performance,
throughput and availability at low cost.
Utilize Linux & Windows Support
–
Customers can run their choice of OS, including Debian, CentOS, CoreOS, SUSE, Ubuntu, Red Hat
Enterprise Linux,
FreeBSD, or Windows Server 2008 R2, 2012 R2, and 2016.
Utilize Batch Processing – Customers can run large compute and batch jobs using Preemptible VMs.
Utilize Containers – Customers can run, manage and orchestrate Docker containers on Compute Engine VMs
or with Google Kubernetes Engine.
Applications
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The Google Compute Engine enables developers to fashion a wide range of
online solutions, including:
- Building and hosting the backend for any mobile application.
- Constructing a massively scalable computer game.
- Taking advantage of the Apache Hadoop software library that allows for
the distributed processing of large data sets across clusters of computers
using simple programming models. - Creating an application with highly customized business logic.
For greater flexibility, the Compute Engine integrates with other Google Cloud platform
technologies, notably:
- Google Cloud Storage
- Google App Engine, good for running web-based apps, line of business
apps, and mobile backends - Google BigQuery
For machine learning practitioners, the Compute Engine can facilitate the use of TensorFlow, Google’s open
source ML library. TensorFlow is designed to run on
multiple computers, or multiple Compute Engine virtual machine instances.
Optimized Virtual Machines
On April 2, 2019, Google announced the expansion of their Compute Engine virtual machine (VM) offerings with Compute-Optimized VMs and
Memory-Optimized VMs, based
on 2nd Generation Intel Xeon
Scalable Processors.
Compute-Optimized VMs
(C2) are ideal for:
- High-performance computing (HPC)
- Electronic design automation (EDA)
- Gaming
- Single-threaded applications
Memory-Optimized VMs (M2) are well
suited for:
- Memory-intensive
workloads such as large in-memory
databases, e.g., SAP HANA - In-memory data analytics
workloads1
Environment
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At the core of the Google Compute Engine are virtual
machine instances that run on the Google Cloud Platform
infrastructure.
Google Cloud Platform
resources are hosted in multiple locations worldwide,
with each location comprised of multiple regions and zones. Putting resources in different zones provides isolation for many types of
infrastructure, hardware, and software failures. Putting
resources in different regions provides an even higher
degree of fault tolerance.
In terms of operation, the Google Compute Engine offers a browser-based Google Cloud Platform
Console tool that permits users to manage their Compute Engine resources through
a graphical interface. Alternatively, users can invoke the Google Cloud Platform
command-line tool.
Importantly, the Google Compute Engine does not guarantee
100 percent uptime, so customers should "take steps to
make sure that [their] service can easily regenerate the
state [of] an
instance should an unexpected failure occur."
Support
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Google offers three varieties of Role-Based Support:
-
Basic
– Billing support and read-only access to
break/fix cases – Free -
Development
– In-depth investigation and
response for developers – $100 per month/user -
Production
– Fast, thorough response for those
managing live solutions – $250 per month/user
The company also provides a form of Enterprise Support:
-
Business-critical
– Strategic guidance and
15-minute response time for Priority 1 cases – Contact Google
Pricing
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Pricing for the
Google Compute Engine is based on per-second usage.
New users can
try the Compute Engine for free. The Google Cloud Platform Free Tier offers free
usage of one f1-micro VM instance per month from North America, excluding
Northern Virginia. This includes 30 GB of Standard persistent disk storage per
month, and 5 GB of snapshot storage per month. Once the free trial is over,
users are billed only for the resources they continue to use.
Competitors
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Amazon: Amazon Web Services
Microsoft: Microsoft Azure
References
1 Brad Calder and Bart Sano. "Introducing Compute- and Memory-Optimized VMs for
Google Compute Engine." Google. April 2, 2019.
Web Links
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- Amazon.com: http://www.amazon.com/
- Amazon Web Services (AWS):
http://aws.amazon.com/ - Google: http://www.google.com/
- Microsoft: http://www.microsoft.com/
About the Author
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James G. Barr is a leading business continuity analyst and
business writer with more than 30 years’ IT experience. A member of
"Who’s Who in Finance and Industry," Mr. Barr has designed,
developed, and deployed business continuity plans for a number of Fortune
500 firms. He is the author of several books, including How to
Succeed in Business BY Really Trying, a member of Faulkner’s Advisory
Panel, and a senior editor for Faulkner’s Security Management
Practices. Mr. Barr can be reached via e-mail at jgbarr@faulkner.com.
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