A Brief About GCE - Google Compute Engine

GCE - Google Compute Engine

Google Compute Engine is a service that provides virtual machines that run on Google infrastructure. Google Compute Engine offers scale, performance, and value that allows you to easily launch large compute clusters on Google's infrastructure. There are no upfront investments and you can run up to thousands of virtual CPUs on a system that has been designed from the ground up to be fast, and to offer strong consistency of performance.

The Google Compute Engine (GCE) is an Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) offering that allows clients to run workloads on Google's infrastructure. The Compute Engine provides a scalable number of virtual machines (VMs) to serve as large compute clusters for that purpose.  

Virtual machines (VMs) are offered as standard Google Linux-based VMs; also customers may use their own system images for custom virtual machines. Virtual machines are offered in a number of memory configurations with up to 16 virtual cores each. The number of allowed instances makes it possible to run thousands of virtual CPUs working on a task.

GCE can be managed through a RESTful API, command line interface (CLI) or Web console. GCE's application program interface (API) provides administrators with virtual machine (VMs), DNS servers and load balancing capabilities. VMs are available in a number of CPU and RAM configurations and Linux distributions, including Debian and CentOS. Customers may use their own system images for custom virtual machines. Data at rest is encrypted using the AEC-128-CBC algorithm. 

GCE's scalable number of allowed instances makes it possible for an administrator to create clusters with thousands of virtual CPUs. GCE allows administrators to select the region and zone where certain data resources will be stored and used. Currently, GCE has three regions: United States, Europe and Asia. Each region has two availability zones and each zone supports either Ivy Bridge or Sandy Bridge processors. GCE also offers a suite of tools for administrators to create advanced networks on the regional level. GCE instances must be within a network to ensure that only instances within the same network can see each other by default. 

Compute Engine is a pay-per-usage service with a 10-minute minimum and per-minute billing thereafter. There are no up-front fees or time-period commitments. GCE competes with Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and Microsoft Azure.

Google Compute Engine offers many capabilities

Create virtual machines with a variety of configurations

• Launch a standard boot image based on Debian or CentOS 6.2 images, or create your own image.
• Create a 64 bit x86 Linux-based virtual machine (VM) instance. Google Compute Engine offers a variety of machine types that you can choose from for your instances.

Maintain and store data in persistent block storage

• From a VM image, mount persistent block storage (persistent disk) that maintains state beyond the life cycle of the VM instance. Data on persistent disks are retained even if your virtual machine instance suffers a failure or is taken offline. Persistent disk data is also replicated for additional redundancy.

Manage network access to your virtual machines

• Use your virtual machines alone or connected together to form a compute cluster
• Connect your machines to the Internet with a flexible networking solution that offers static and ephemeral IPv4 addresses for your instances.
• Use the built-in layer 3 load balancing service to distribute heavy workloads across many virtual machines.
• Use an easily configurable firewall to set up network access to your instances.
• Create an internal network of virtual machines or set up access to external traffic by setting up customizable firewall rules.
• Connect your VM instances to each other and to the Internet with our fully encapsulated layer 3 network. Our network offers strong isolation to help protect your instances from undesired access.
• Locate other instances in your project using DNS lookup of VM names.

Use a variety of tools and OAuth 2.0 authentication to manage your virtual machines

• Access your virtual machine instances through the Compute Engine console, RESTful API, or through a simple command line tool.
• Take advantage of OAuth 2.0 to authenticate to the RESTful API to create and delete virtual machine instances, disks, and other resources. Also, leverage OAuth 2.0 to seamlessly integrate with other Google Cloud services such as Google Cloud Storage.
• Use service account identities to authenticate your instances to other services, and remove the need to push keys into VM instances.

Note:  Google Compute Engine does not guarantee 100% uptime, so you should take steps to make sure that your service can easily regenerate the state on an instance should an unexpected failure occur. If you do not, your service will be adversely affected if your instances fall offline.