Compute Engine

Google Compute Engine is GCP infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) offering that lets you create and run virtual machines (VMs) on Google infrastructure. It provides scalable, high-performance VMs with a wide variety of configurations.

Key Features:

1. Machine types - General purpose (E2, N2), compute optimized (C2), memory optimized (M2), GPU (A100, T4).

2. Preemptible VMs - Up to 91% cheaper short-lived VMs for batch workloads.

3. Live migration - VMs are migrated during host maintenance without downtime.

4. Custom machine types - Create VMs with exactly the CPU/memory you need.

5. Sole-tenant nodes - Physical servers dedicated exclusively to your workloads.

The below example shows how to create and manage Compute Engine VMs using gcloud CLI.

It gives the following output,

Created [https://www.googleapis.com/compute/v1/projects/my-project/zones/us-central1-a/instances/my-vm].
NAME   ZONE           MACHINE_TYPE  PREEMPTIBLE  INTERNAL_IP  EXTERNAL_IP    STATUS
my-vm  us-central1-a  e2-medium                  10.128.0.2   34.68.100.50   RUNNING

Compute Engine Pricing:

On-demand - Pay per second with 1-minute minimum. No upfront commitment.

Sustained use discounts - Automatic discounts up to 30% for VMs running more than 25% of a month.

Committed use discounts - Up to 57% discount for 1-year or 3-year commitments.

Spot VMs - Up to 91% discount for preemptible, fault-tolerant batch workloads.