Compute Engine is an infrastructure as a service (IaaS) product that offersself-managed virtual machine (VM) instances and bare metal instances.Compute Engine offers VMs with a KVM hypervisor, operating systems forboth Linux and Windows, and durable storage options. You can configure andcontrol Compute Engine resources using the Google Cloud console, theGoogle Cloud CLI, or using a REST-based API. You can also use a variety ofprogramming languages available with Google'sCloud Client Libraries.

Here are some of the benefits of using Compute Engine:

• Extensibility: Compute Engine integrates with Google Cloudtechnologies such as Cloud Storage, Google Kubernetes Engine, andBigQuery, to extend beyond the basic computational capability tocreate more complex and sophisticated applications.

• Scalability: Scale the number of compute resources as needed withouthaving to manage your own infrastructure. This is useful for businesses thatexperience sudden increases in traffic, because you can quickly add moreinstances to handle the increase and remove the instances after they are nolonger needed.

• Reliability: Google's infrastructure is highly reliable, with a 99.9%uptime guarantee.

• Cost-effectiveness: Compute Engine offers a variety of pricingoptions to fit your budget. Also, you only pay for the resources that you use,and there are no up-front costs.

What Compute Engine provides

Compute Engine provides flexibility so that you can run a wide-rangeof applications and workloads that support your needs. From batch processingto webserving or high performance computing you can configureCompute Engine to meet your needs.

Location selection

Google offers worldwide regions for you to deploy Compute Engineresources. You can choose a region that best fits the requirements of yourworkload:

• Region-specific restrictions
• User latency by region
• Latency requirements of your application
• Amount of control over latency
• Balance between low latency and simplicity

For more information about regions and zones, seeAbout regions and zones.

Compute Engine machine types

Compute Engine provides a comprehensive set of machine families, eachcontaining machine types to choose from when you create a compute instance. Eachmachine family is comprised of machine series and predefined machine typeswithin each series.

Compute Engine offers general-purpose, compute-optimized,storage-optimized, memory-optimized, and accelerator-optimized machinefamilies.If a preconfigured, general-purpose machine type doesn't meet your needs, thenyou can create a custom machine type with customized CPU and memory resourcesfor some of the machine series.

For more information, see theMachine families resource guide.

Operating systems

Compute Engine provides many preconfigured public operating systemimages for both Linux and Windows.

Most public images are provided for no additional cost, but there are somepremium images for which you arebilled. You are not billed for importing custom images, but you will incur animage storage charge while you keepthe custom image in your project.

Storage options

You 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 notdurable. If you stop the instance, the data on the Local SSD disks that areattached to the instance is lost.Local SSD disks are attached directly to the same server as the compute instance.

• Hyperdisk: The fastest durable storage forCompute Engine. Data on Hyperdisk volumes is preservedeven if you stop the instance. Hyperdisk volumes offerconfigurable performance and can be resized dynamically.You can also reduce costs and disk management complexity by purchasingcapacity and performance in advance with Hyperdisk Storage Pools.

• Persistent Disk: If you need durable storage for a machine series thatdoesn't support Hyperdisk, then use Persistent Disk. Persistent Disk providesfast durable block storage that is preserved even if you stop the instance.

Each option has unique pricing and performance. For more information aboutdisks in Compute Engine, seeChoose a disk type.

For cost comparisons, seeDisk pricing.

What's next

• See theCPU platforms andGPUs that are available for your use.
• Read anoverview of networking capabilities.
• Learn about the variousdeployment strategies.