Compute Engine is an infrastructure as a service (IaaS) product that offers
self-managed virtual machine (VM) instances and bare
metal instances. Compute Engine offers VMs with a KVM hypervisor,
operating systems for both Linux and Windows, and local and durable
storage options. You can configure and control Compute Engine
resources using the Google Cloud console, the Google Cloud CLI, or using a
REST-based API. You can also use a variety of programming languages available
with Google's

.


Here are some of the benefits of using Compute Engine:




Extensibility:
 Compute Engine integrates with Google Cloud
technologies such as Cloud Storage, Google Kubernetes Engine, and
BigQuery, to extend beyond the basic computational capability to
create more complex and sophisticated applications.


Scalability:
 Scale the number of compute resources as needed without
having to manage your own infrastructure. This is useful for businesses that
experience sudden increases in traffic, because you can quickly add more
instances to handle the increase and remove the instances after they are no
longer needed.


Reliability:
 Google's infrastructure is highly reliable, with a 99.9%
uptime guarantee.


Cost-effectiveness:
 Compute Engine offers a variety of pricing
options to fit your budget. Also, you only pay for the resources that you use,
and there are no up-front costs.




What Compute Engine provides


Compute Engine provides flexibility so that you can run a wide-range
of applications and workloads that support your needs. From batch processing
to webserving or high performance computing you can configure
Compute Engine to meet your needs.


Location selection


Google offers worldwide regions for you to deploy Compute Engine
resources. You can choose a region that best fits the requirements of your
workload:




Region-specific restrictions


User latency by region


Latency requirements of your application


Amount of control over latency


Balance between low latency and simplicity




For more information about regions and zones, see

.


Compute Engine machine types


Compute Engine provides a comprehensive set of machine families, each
containing machine types to choose from when you create a compute instance. Each
machine family is comprised of machine series and predefined machine types
within each series.


Compute Engine offers general-purpose, compute-optimized,
storage-optimized, memory-optimized, and accelerator-optimized machine
families. If a preconfigured, general-purpose machine type doesn't meet your
needs, then you can create a custom machine type with customized CPU and memory
resources for some of the machine series.


For more information, see the

.


Operating systems


Compute Engine provides many preconfigured public operating system
images for both Linux and Windows. Most public images are provided for no
additional cost, but there are some

 for which you are
billed. You are not billed for importing custom images, but you will incur an

 while you keep
the custom image in your project.


Storage options


You can choose from several block storage options, including Persistent Disk,
Google Cloud Hyperdisk, and Local SSD:




Persistent Disk:
 High-performance and redundant network storage. Each
volume is striped across hundreds of physical disks.


Hyperdisk:
 The fastest redundant network storage for
Compute Engine, with configurable performance and volumes that can be
resized dynamically. Each volume is striped across hundreds of physical disks.
You can also reduce costs and disk management complexity by purchasing
capacity and performance in advance with Hyperdisk Storage Pools. Hyperdisk Storage Pools provide
an aggregate amount of capacity and performance that you can share among the
disks created in the pool.


Local SSD:
 Physical drives that are attached directly to the same
server as a compute instance. They offer better performance, but are not
durable. If the instance is shut down, then the Local SSD disks are deleted.




Each option has unique price and performance. For cost comparisons, see

. For more information about
disk types, see 
.


What's next




See the 
 and

 that are available for your use.


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.