Google Compute Engine is now Generally Available

http://googlecloudplatform.blogspot.com/2013/12/google-compute-engine-is-now-generally-available.html

by aryann • 13 years ago

92 28 13 years ago

googlecloudplatform.blogspot.com

philip1209• 13 years ago

This strikes me as an odd time to release the platform. My impression is that most companies avoid major infrastructure changes during the holiday season to maintain uptime for the surge in revenue. Even for B2B companies, it is the final month of the quarter. I would think that early January would be the best time launch and promote a new service that requires major infrastructure changes by clients.

k3n• 13 years ago

You'd be surprised, for a lot of industries -- and for select departments of others -- the holidays are a source of relative slowdown. I've done more than one migration, roll-out, or refresh over the holidays, since there's usually less users to concurrently support (and thus downtime is less disruptive).

abraham• 13 years ago

There are probably a fair amount of engineers on holiday vacation that might tinker with the platform for personal projects.

albertyw• 13 years ago

Amazon EC2 vs Google CE - Fight.

threeseed2• 13 years ago

Does anyone just use EC2/CE though ? Surely it is about the entire platform.

pjmlp• 13 years ago

Yes, lots of our customers do deploy to EC2 just to have the VM management facilities.

shuzchen• 13 years ago

People looking to test this out might want to try apply for the starterpack (https://cloud.google.com/developers/starterpack/ promo code brdo-in). I know a few people with pretty vague ideas that still got accepted, although I'm not sure if they'll be more selective now that the service is generally available.

trimbo2• 13 years ago

Before we get into how terrible Google customer support is in general... has anyone actually tried their phone support for this service and can weigh in on it?

lerchmo• 13 years ago

support is fantastic, we have a large cluster on GCE. I don't know how support will scale with general availability though.

trimbo2• 13 years ago

You've called them on the phone? What were the incident(s) / support needs like on your part?

threeseed2• 13 years ago

You know it seems very suspicious to create a new account to say this.

Especially since the common wisdom (and from my personal experience as well) is that Google's support is woeful.

rogerbinns2• 13 years ago

We are having amusing problems with appengine. For example they provide no way to limit the number of instances they decide to start. If for example you run out of datastore i/o capacity (it doesn't scale with how much you pay) they will quite happily start more instances even though they won't help in any way, and actually make things worse.

We switched to premier which supposedly gets us all sorts of extra stuff, but for some bizarre reason will no longer show your daily charge breakdowns.

bgoldy4• 13 years ago

Roger, sorry to hear this. Can you ping me at bgold at google.com so I can make sure you are getting the right help? Thanks!

Strom• 13 years ago

There's no way to limit the number of instances that are started, but there is a way to limit the number of idle instances that you are paying for.

codex• 13 years ago

One salient new feature:

Transparent maintenance with live migration and automatic restart

At Google, we have found that regular maintenance of hardware and software infrastructure is critical to operating with a high level of reliability, security and performance. We’re introducing transparent maintenance that combines software and data center innovations with live migration technology to perform proactive maintenance while your virtual machines keep running. You now get all the benefits of regular updates and proactive maintenance without the downtime and reboots typically required. Furthermore, in the event of a failure, we automatically restart your VMs and get them back online in minutes. We’ve already rolled out this feature to our US zones, with others to follow in the coming months.

tlb• 13 years ago

I'm curious about how regular hardware maintenance improves reliability. Are you just cleaning out dust? Or do you do periodic stress tests to catch failures early?

amaks• 13 years ago

HW does fail over time and needs to be replaced. This involves shutdown of physical infrastructure at different levels.

bgoldy4• 13 years ago

regular maintenance helps with reliability because we do a lot of work proactively with power, hvac, switches, etc. which reduces likelihood of failure. Being able to perform maintenance in general is generally good for the stability of our system.

-Brian

jhgg• 13 years ago

I really look forward to a price / performance comparison between GCE and AWS. Persistent disk performance and no charge for IO looks really nice. It'll be great to see some real world numbers and benchmarks. Some key metrics I'm looking for are disk performance, CPU performance (how fast a single core is rated relative to amazon's ECU) and network performance!

regecks• 13 years ago

There are some initial benchmarks here: http://serverbear.com/10151/google-compute-engine

bgoldy4• 13 years ago

The guys at Scalr were working on some benchmarking AFAIK. It's not up yet but I expect it will be soon-ish. http://blog.scalr.com/

zafirk• 13 years ago

Conceptual overview of Compute Engine: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LqoXz-W3R80

recuter• 13 years ago

Now you can run any out-of-the-box Linux distribution as well as any kernel or software you like. We’re also announcing support for SUSE and Red Hat Enterprise Linux (in Limited Preview) and FreeBSD.

====

Finally! I'm going to try and make TinyCore run: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiny_Core_Linux

10MB images, 28MB of RAM, should boot in under 10 seconds.

NateDad• 13 years ago

No Ubuntu?

mrwnmonm• 13 years ago

now i'm confused between app engine and compute engine :(

Google Compute Engine is now Generally Available

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