Google Compute Engine made generally available

Google has made its Compute Engine cloud computing and storage infrastructure as a service platform publically available, following a limited preview kicked off in July last year.

The general availability release of Compute Engine has been accompanied by price drops of ten per cent for Google's most popular instances, in all regions. Google has also slashed the price of persistent disc storage by 60 percent.

Provisioned space on persistent disc storage now costs US$0.04 per gigabyte per month, with snapshot storage priced at US$0.125 per gigabyte per month. I/O operations incur no additional charge.

Google has expanded operating systems from just two Linux distributions, Debian and CentOS, to any other Penguin-ware such as SuSE and Red Hat Linux and more importantly the *BSD-based FreeBSD.

Still under limited release for developers requiring greater computational power and memory are three new Compute Engine instances with up to 16 processor cores and 104 gigabytes of memory.

For Asia-Pacific destinations, Internet egress traffic charges per gigabyte are US$0.21 for up to one terabyte a month, dropping to US$0.18 for one to ten terabyte, and US$0.15 above that. This is substantially higher than for the Americas and Europe, Middle East and African destinations, where charges are US$0.12, 0.11 and 0.08 per gigabyte respectively.

Google offers 24/7 support for Compute Engine and service level agreements with 99.5 percent uptime along with security features such as encryption.

The company also offers live migrations within the cloud for maintenance, to reduce downtime with automatic restart of virtual machines in case of failure.