Stay organized with collections Save and categorize content based on your preferences.
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 Cloud Client Libraries.
Here are some of the benefits of using Compute Engine:
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 selectionGoogle offers worldwide regions for you to deploy Compute Engine resources. You can choose a region that best fits the requirements of your workload:
For more information about regions and zones, see About regions and zones.
Compute Engine machine typesCompute 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 Machine families resource guide.
Operating systemsCompute 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 premium images for which you are billed. You are not billed for importing custom images, but you will incur an image storage charge while you keep the custom image in your project.
Storage optionsYou can choose from several block storage options, including Google Cloud Hyperdisk, Local SSD, and Persistent Disk.
Local SSD: Physical drives that offer the best performance, but are not durable. If you stop the instance, the data on the Local SSD disks that are attached to the instance is lost. Local SSD disks are attached directly to the same server as the compute instance.
Hyperdisk: The fastest durable storage for Compute Engine. Data on Hyperdisk volumes is preserved even if you stop the instance. Hyperdisk volumes offer configurable performance and can be resized dynamically. You can also reduce costs and disk management complexity by purchasing capacity and performance in advance with Hyperdisk Storage Pools.
Persistent Disk: If you need durable storage for a machine series that doesn't support Hyperdisk, then use Persistent Disk. Persistent Disk provides fast durable block storage that is preserved even if you stop the instance.
Each option has unique pricing and performance. For more information about disks in Compute Engine, see Choose a disk type. For cost comparisons, see Disk pricing.
What's nextExcept as otherwise noted, the content of this page is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License, and code samples are licensed under the Apache 2.0 License. For details, see the Google Developers Site Policies. Java is a registered trademark of Oracle and/or its affiliates.
Last updated 2025-08-07 UTC.
[[["Easy to understand","easyToUnderstand","thumb-up"],["Solved my problem","solvedMyProblem","thumb-up"],["Other","otherUp","thumb-up"]],[["Hard to understand","hardToUnderstand","thumb-down"],["Incorrect information or sample code","incorrectInformationOrSampleCode","thumb-down"],["Missing the information/samples I need","missingTheInformationSamplesINeed","thumb-down"],["Other","otherDown","thumb-down"]],["Last updated 2025-08-07 UTC."],[[["Compute Engine is an IaaS product offering self-managed virtual and bare metal machine instances with Linux and Windows OS options, controllable via the Google Cloud console, CLI, or a REST-based API."],["Compute Engine's benefits include extensibility with other Google Cloud services, scalability to adapt to traffic changes, high reliability with a 99.9% uptime guarantee, and cost-effectiveness through various pricing options and pay-per-use billing."],["Google provides worldwide regions for deploying Compute Engine resources, allowing users to choose based on region-specific needs, latency, and control requirements."],["Compute Engine provides a range of machine families, including general-purpose, compute-optimized, storage-optimized, memory-optimized, and accelerator-optimized, with the option to create custom machine types."],["Users can select from various storage options like Persistent Disk, Hyperdisk, and Local SSD, each with distinct price and performance characteristics to accommodate different needs."]]],[]]
RetroSearch is an open source project built by @garambo | Open a GitHub Issue
Search and Browse the WWW like it's 1997 | Search results from DuckDuckGo
HTML:
3.2
| Encoding:
UTF-8
| Version:
0.7.4