Compute Engine

Virtual machines for any workload

Easily create and run online VMs on high-performance, reliable cloud infrastructure. Choose from preset or custom machine types for web servers, databases, AI, and more.

Get one e2-micro VM instance free per month. New customers also get $300 in free credits to try Compute Engine and other Google Cloud products.

Features

Preset and custom configurations

Deploy an application in minutes with prebuilt samples called Jump Start Solutions. Create a dynamic website, load-balanced VM, three-tier web app, or ecommerce web app.

Choose from predefined machine types, sizes, and configurations for any workload, from large enterprise applications, to modern workloads (like containers) or AI/ML projects that require GPUs and TPUs.

For more flexibility, create a custom machine type between 1 and 96 vCPUs with up to 8.0 GB of memory per core. And leverage one of many block storage options, from flexible Persistent Disk to high performance and low-latency Local SSD.

Industry-leading reliability

Compute Engine offers the best single instance compute availability SLA of any cloud provider: 99.95% availability for memory-optimized VMs and 99.9% for all other VM families. 

Is downtime keeping you up at night? Maintain workload continuity during planned and unplanned events with live migration. When a VM goes down, Compute Engine performs a live migration to another host in the same zone.

Automations and recommendations for resource efficiency

Automatically add VMs to handle peak load and replace underperforming instances with managed instance groups

Manually adjust your resources using historical data with rightsizing recommendations, or guarantee capacity for planned demand spikes with future reservations.

All of our latest compute instances (including C4A, C4, N4, C3D, X4, and Z3) run on Titanium, a system of purpose-built microcontrollers and tiered scale-out offloads to improve your infrastructure performance, life cycle management, and security.


Transparent pricing and discounting

Review detailed pricing guidance for any VM type or configuration, or use our pricing calculator to get a personalized estimate.

To save on batch jobs and fault-tolerant workloads, use Spot VMs to reduce your bill from 60-91%.

Receive automatic discounts for sustained use, or up to 70% off when you sign up for committed use discounts.

Security controls and configurations

Encrypt data-in-use and while it’s being processed with Confidential VMs

Defend against rootkits and bootkits with Shielded VMs.

Meet stringent compliance standards for data residency, sovereignty, access, and encryption with Assured Workloads.

Workload Manager

Now available for SAP workloads, Workload Manager evaluates your application workloads by detecting deviations from documented standards and best practices to proactively prevent issues, continuously analyze workloads, and simplify system troubleshooting.

VM Manager

VM Manager is a suite of tools that can be used to manage operating systems for large virtual machine (VM) fleets running Windows and Linux on Compute Engine.

Sole-tenant nodes

Sole-tenant nodes are physical Compute Engine servers dedicated exclusively for your use. Sole-tenant nodes simplify deployment for bring-your-own-license (BYOL) applications. Sole-tenant nodes give you access to the same machine types and VM configuration options as regular compute instances.

TPU accelerators

Cloud TPUs can be added to accelerate machine learning and artificial intelligence applications. Cloud TPUs can be reserved, used on-demand, or available as preemptible VMs.

Linux and Windows support

Run your choice of OS, including Debian, CentOS Stream, Fedora CoreOS, SUSE, Ubuntu, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, FreeBSD, or Windows Server 2008 R2, 2012 R2, and 2016. You can also use a shared image from the Google Cloud community or bring your own.

Container support

Run, manage, and orchestrate Docker containers on Compute Engine VMs with Google Kubernetes Engine.

Placement policy

Use placement policy to specify the location of your underlying hardware instances. Spread placement policy provides higher reliability by placing instances on distinct hardware, reducing the impact of underlying hardware failures. Compact placement policy provides lower latency between nodes by placing instances close together within the same network infrastructure. 

Choose the right VM for your workload and requirements

OptimizationWorkloadsOur recommendation

Efficient

Lowest cost per core.

  • Web and app servers (low traffic)
  • Dev and test environments
  • Containerized microservices
  • Virtual desktops


General purpose E-Series

E2

Flexible

Best price-performance for balanced and flexible workloads. 

  • Web and app servers (low to medium traffic)
  • Containerized microservices
  • Virtual desktops
  • Back-office, CRM, or BI applications
  • Data pipelines
  • Databases (small to medium sized)

General purpose N-Series

N4, N2, N2D, and N1

Performance

Best performance with advanced capabilities.

  • Web and app servers (high traffic)
  • Ad servers
  • Game servers
  • Data analytics
  • Databases (any size)
  • In-memory caches
  • Media streaming and transcoding
  • CPU-based AI/ML

General purpose C-Series

C4A, C4, C3, C3D

Compute

Highest compute per core.

  • Web and app servers 
  • Game servers
  • Media streaming and transcoding 
  • Compute-bound workloads 
  • High performance computing (HPC)
  • CPU-based AI/ML

Specialized H-Series

H3

Memory

Highest memory per core.

  • Databases (large)
  • In-memory caches
  • Electronic design automation
  • Modeling and simulation

Specialized M-Series 

X4, M3

Storage

Highest storage per core.

  • Data analytics
  • Databases (large horizontal scale-out, flash-optimized, data warehouses, and more)

Specialized Z-Series

Z3

Inference and visualization with GPUs

Best performance for inference and visualization tasks requiring GPUs.

  • CUDA-enabled ML training and inference
  • Video transcoding

Specialized G-series

G2

All other GPU tasks

Highest performing GPUs.

  • Massively parallelized computation 
  • BERT natural language processing 
  • Deep learning recommendation model (DLRM)

Specialized A-series

A3

Efficient

Lowest cost per core.

Workloads
  • Web and app servers (low traffic)
  • Dev and test environments
  • Containerized microservices
  • Virtual desktops


Our recommendation

General purpose E-Series

E2

Flexible

Best price-performance for balanced and flexible workloads. 

Workloads
  • Web and app servers (low to medium traffic)
  • Containerized microservices
  • Virtual desktops
  • Back-office, CRM, or BI applications
  • Data pipelines
  • Databases (small to medium sized)
Our recommendation

General purpose N-Series

N4, N2, N2D, and N1

Performance

Best performance with advanced capabilities.

Workloads
  • Web and app servers (high traffic)
  • Ad servers
  • Game servers
  • Data analytics
  • Databases (any size)
  • In-memory caches
  • Media streaming and transcoding
  • CPU-based AI/ML
Our recommendation

General purpose C-Series

C4A, C4, C3, C3D

Compute

Highest compute per core.

Workloads
  • Web and app servers 
  • Game servers
  • Media streaming and transcoding 
  • Compute-bound workloads 
  • High performance computing (HPC)
  • CPU-based AI/ML
Our recommendation

Specialized H-Series

H3

Memory

Highest memory per core.

Workloads
  • Databases (large)
  • In-memory caches
  • Electronic design automation
  • Modeling and simulation
Our recommendation

Specialized M-Series 

X4, M3

Storage

Highest storage per core.

Workloads
  • Data analytics
  • Databases (large horizontal scale-out, flash-optimized, data warehouses, and more)
Our recommendation

Specialized Z-Series

Z3

Inference and visualization with GPUs

Best performance for inference and visualization tasks requiring GPUs.

Workloads
  • CUDA-enabled ML training and inference
  • Video transcoding
Our recommendation

Specialized G-series

G2

All other GPU tasks

Highest performing GPUs.

Workloads
  • Massively parallelized computation 
  • BERT natural language processing 
  • Deep learning recommendation model (DLRM)
Our recommendation

Specialized A-series

A3

How It Works

Compute Engine is a computing and hosting service that lets you create and run virtual machines on Google infrastructure, comparable to Amazon EC2 and Azure Virtual Machines. Compute Engine offers scale, performance, and value that lets you easily launch large compute clusters with no up-front investment.

Compute Engine in 2-minutes
Compute Engine in 2-minutes

Common Uses

Create your first VM

Three ways to get started

  1. Complete a tutorial. Learn how to deploy a Linux VM, Windows Server VM, load balanced VM, Java app, custom website, LAMP stack, and much more.
  2. Deploy a pre-configured sample application—Jump Start Solution—in just a few clicks.
  3. Create a VM from scratch using the Google Cloud console, CLI, API, or Client Libraries like C#, Go, and Java. Use our documentation for step-by-step guidance.
Documentation: Creating a VM instance
Creating a VM instance

Three ways to get started

  1. Complete a tutorial. Learn how to deploy a Linux VM, Windows Server VM, load balanced VM, Java app, custom website, LAMP stack, and much more.
  2. Deploy a pre-configured sample application—Jump Start Solution—in just a few clicks.
  3. Create a VM from scratch using the Google Cloud console, CLI, API, or Client Libraries like C#, Go, and Java. Use our documentation for step-by-step guidance.
Documentation: Creating a VM instance
Creating a VM instance

How to choose the right VM

With thousands of applications, each with different requirements, which VM is right for you?
Video: Choose the right VM
Choose the right VM

Migrate and optimize enterprise applications

Three ways to get started

  1. Complete a lab or tutorial. Generate a rapid estimate of your migration costs, learn how to migrate a Linux VM, VMware, SQL servers, and much more.
  2. Visit the Cloud Architecture Center for advice on how to plan, design, and implement your cloud migration.
  3. Apply for end-to-end migration and modernization support via Google Cloud’s Rapid Migration Program (RaMP).
Guide: Migrate to Google Cloud

Three ways to get started

  1. Complete a lab or tutorial. Generate a rapid estimate of your migration costs, learn how to migrate a Linux VM, VMware, SQL servers, and much more.
  2. Visit the Cloud Architecture Center for advice on how to plan, design, and implement your cloud migration.
  3. Apply for end-to-end migration and modernization support via Google Cloud’s Rapid Migration Program (RaMP).
Guide: Migrate to Google Cloud

Access documentation, guides, and reference architectures

Migration Center is Google Cloud's unified migration platform. With features like cloud spend estimation, asset discovery, and a variety of tooling for different migration scenarios, it provides you with what you need to get started.
Start here: Google Cloud Migration Center
Migration center overview

Backup and restore your applications

Explore your options

Compute Engine offers ways to backup and restore:

  1. Virtual machine instances
  2. Persistent Disk and Hyperdisk volumes
  3. Workloads running in Compute Engine and on-premises

Start with a tutorial, or read the detailed options in our documentation.

Documentation: Backup and restore

    Explore your options

    Compute Engine offers ways to backup and restore:

    1. Virtual machine instances
    2. Persistent Disk and Hyperdisk volumes
    3. Workloads running in Compute Engine and on-premises

    Start with a tutorial, or read the detailed options in our documentation.

    Documentation: Backup and restore

      Access a fully managed backup and disaster recovery service

      We offer a managed backup and disaster recovery (DR) service for centralized data protection of VMs and other workloads running in Google Cloud and on-premises. It uses snapshots to incrementally backup data from your persistent disks at the instance level.
      Overview: Backup and DR service

      Run modern container-based applications

      Three ways to deploy containers

      Containers let you run your apps with fewer dependencies on the host virtual machine and independently from other containerized apps using the same host.

      1. If you need complete control over your environment, run container images directly on Compute Engine.
      2. To simplify cluster management and container orchestration tasks, use Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE).
      3. To completely remove the need for clusters or infrastructure management, use Cloud Run.
      Guide: What are containers?

      Three ways to deploy containers

      Containers let you run your apps with fewer dependencies on the host virtual machine and independently from other containerized apps using the same host.

      1. If you need complete control over your environment, run container images directly on Compute Engine.
      2. To simplify cluster management and container orchestration tasks, use Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE).
      3. To completely remove the need for clusters or infrastructure management, use Cloud Run.
      Guide: What are containers?

      Infrastructure for AI workloads

      AI-optimized hardware

      We designed the accelerator-optimized machine family to deliver the performance and efficiency you need for AI workloads. Start by comparing our GPUs, or learn about TPUs for large scale AI training and inference tasks.
      Documentation: Accelerator-optimized VMs

      What’s the difference between a CPU, GPU, and TPU?

      AI-optimized hardware

      We designed the accelerator-optimized machine family to deliver the performance and efficiency you need for AI workloads. Start by comparing our GPUs, or learn about TPUs for large scale AI training and inference tasks.
      Documentation: Accelerator-optimized VMs

      What’s the difference between a CPU, GPU, and TPU?

      Pricing

      How Compute Engine pricing worksCompute Engine pricing varies based on your requirements for performance, storage, networking, location, and more.
      ServicesDescriptionPrice (USD)

      Get started free

      New users get $300 in free trial credits to use within 90 days.

      Free

      The Compute Engine free tier gives you one e2-micro VM instance, up to 30 GB storage, and up to 1 GB of outbound data transfers per month.

      Free

      VM instances

      Pay-as-you-go

      Only pay for the services you use. No up-front fees. No termination charges. Pricing varies by product and usage.

      Starting at

      $0.01

      (e2-micro)

      Confidential VMs

      Encrypt data-in-use and while it’s being processed.

      Starting at

      $0.936

      Per vCPU per month

      Sole tenant nodes

      Physical servers dedicated to your project. Pay a premium on top of the standard price (pay-as-you-go rate for selected vCPU and memory resources).

      +10%

      On top of standard price

      Discount: Committed use

      Pay less when you commit to a minimum spend in advance.

      Save up to 70%

      Discount: Spot VMs

      Pay less when you run fault-tolerant jobs using excess Compute Engine capacity.

      Save up to 91%

      Discount: Sustained use

      Pay less on resources that are used for more than 25% of a month (and are not receiving any other discounts).


      Save up to 30%

      Storage

      Persistent disk

      Durable network storage devices that your virtual machine (VM) instances can access. The data on each Persistent Disk volume is distributed across several physical disks.

      Starting at

      $0.04

      Per GB per month

      Hyperdisk

      The fastest persistent disk storage for Compute Engine, with configurable performance and volumes that can be dynamically resized.

      Starting at

      $0.125

      Per GB per month

      Local SSD

      Physically attached to the server that hosts your VM.

      Starting at

      $0.08

      Per GB per month

      Networking

      Standard tier

      Leverage the public internet to carry traffic between your services and your users.

      Free

      Inbound transfers, always. Outbound transfers, up to 200 GB per month.

      Premium tier

      Leverage Google's premium backbone to carry traffic to and from your external users.


      Starting at

      $0.08

      Per GB per month for outbound data transfers. Inbound transfers remain free.

      To estimate costs based on your requirements, use our pricing calculator or reach out to our sales team to request a quote.

      How Compute Engine pricing works

      Compute Engine pricing varies based on your requirements for performance, storage, networking, location, and more.

      Get started free

      Description

      New users get $300 in free trial credits to use within 90 days.

      Price (USD)

      Free

      The Compute Engine free tier gives you one e2-micro VM instance, up to 30 GB storage, and up to 1 GB of outbound data transfers per month.

      Description

      Free

      VM instances

      Description

      Pay-as-you-go

      Only pay for the services you use. No up-front fees. No termination charges. Pricing varies by product and usage.

      Price (USD)

      Starting at

      $0.01

      (e2-micro)

      Confidential VMs

      Encrypt data-in-use and while it’s being processed.

      Description

      Starting at

      $0.936

      Per vCPU per month

      Sole tenant nodes

      Physical servers dedicated to your project. Pay a premium on top of the standard price (pay-as-you-go rate for selected vCPU and memory resources).

      Description

      +10%

      On top of standard price

      Discount: Committed use

      Pay less when you commit to a minimum spend in advance.

      Description

      Save up to 70%

      Discount: Spot VMs

      Pay less when you run fault-tolerant jobs using excess Compute Engine capacity.

      Description

      Save up to 91%

      Discount: Sustained use

      Pay less on resources that are used for more than 25% of a month (and are not receiving any other discounts).


      Description

      Save up to 30%

      Storage

      Description

      Persistent disk

      Durable network storage devices that your virtual machine (VM) instances can access. The data on each Persistent Disk volume is distributed across several physical disks.

      Price (USD)

      Starting at

      $0.04

      Per GB per month

      Hyperdisk

      The fastest persistent disk storage for Compute Engine, with configurable performance and volumes that can be dynamically resized.

      Description

      Starting at

      $0.125

      Per GB per month

      Local SSD

      Physically attached to the server that hosts your VM.

      Description

      Starting at

      $0.08

      Per GB per month

      Networking

      Description

      Standard tier

      Leverage the public internet to carry traffic between your services and your users.

      Price (USD)

      Free

      Inbound transfers, always. Outbound transfers, up to 200 GB per month.

      Premium tier

      Leverage Google's premium backbone to carry traffic to and from your external users.


      Description

      Starting at

      $0.08

      Per GB per month for outbound data transfers. Inbound transfers remain free.

      To estimate costs based on your requirements, use our pricing calculator or reach out to our sales team to request a quote.

      Pricing Calculator

      Estimate your monthly Compute Engine charges, including cluster management fees.

      Need help?

      Chat to us online, call us directly or request a call back.

      Start your proof of concept

      New customers get $300 in free credits to try Compute and other Google Cloud products.

      Have a large project?

      Browse quickstarts, tutorials, or interactive walkthroughs for Compute Engine

      Choose a learning path, build your skills, and validate your knowledge with Cloud Skills Boost

      Learn and experiment with pre-built solution templates handpicked by our experts

      Business Case

      Learn from Compute Engine customers


      Migrating 40,000 on-prem VMs to the cloud, Sabre reduced their IT costs by 40%.

      Joe DiFonzo, CIO, Sabre

      “We’ve taken hundreds of millions of dollars of costs out of our business.”

      Watch the interview

      Partners & Integration

      Accelerate your migration with partners
      • Stratozone
      • RISC
      • Cloudamize
      • atadata
      • Stratozone
      • RISC
      • Cloudamize
      • atadata
      • accenture
      • deloitte
      • rackspace
      • sada
      • wipro

      Ready to move your compute workloads to Google Cloud? These partners can guide you through every stage—from initial planning and assessment to migration.

      FAQ

      What is Compute Engine? What can it do?

      Compute Engine is an Infrastructure-as-a-Service product offering flexible, self-managed virtual machines (VMs) hosted on Google's infrastructure. Compute Engine includes Linux and Windows-based VMs running on KVM, local and durable storage options, and a simple REST-based API for configuration and control. The service integrates with Google Cloud technologies, such as Cloud Storage, App Engine, and BigQuery to extend beyond the basic computational capability to create more complex and sophisticated apps.

      On Compute Engine, each virtual CPU (vCPU) is implemented as a single hardware hyper-thread on one of the available CPU Platforms. On Intel Xeon processors, Intel Hyper-Threading Technology allows multiple application threads to run on each physical processor core. You configure your Compute Engine VMs with one or more of these hyper-threads as vCPUs. The machine type specifies the number of vCPUs that your instance has.

      We see the two as being complementary. App Engine is Google's Platform-as-a-Service offering and Compute Engine is Google's Infrastructure-as-a-Service offering. App Engine is great for running web-based apps, line of business apps, and mobile backends. Compute Engine is great for when you need more control of the underlying infrastructure. For example, you might use Compute Engine when you have highly customized business logic or you want to run your own storage system.

      Compute Engine charges based on compute instance, storage, and network use. VMs are charged on a per-second basis with a one minute minimum. Storage cost is calculated based on the amount of data you store. Network cost is calculated based on the amount of data transferred between VMs that communicate with each other and with the internet. For more information, review our price sheet.

      Yes, we offer paid support for enterprise customers. For more information, contact our sales organization.

      Yes, we offer a Compute Engine SLA.

      For billing-related questions, you can send questions to the appropriate support channel.

      For feature requests and bug reports, submit an issue to our issues tracker.

      1. Go to the Google Cloud console. When prompted, select an existing project or create a new project.
      2. Follow the prompts to set up billing. If you are new to Google Cloud, you have free trial credit to pay for your instances.

      Every project can be identified in two ways: the project number or the project ID. The project number is automatically created when you create the project, whereas the project ID is created by you, or whoever created the project. The project ID is optional for many services, but is required by Compute Engine. For more information, see Google Cloud console projects.

      Persistent disk performance scales with the size of the persistent disk. Use the persistent disk performance chart to help decide what size disk works for you. If you're not sure, read the documentation to decide how big to make your persistent disk.

      By default, all Compute Engine projects have default quotas for various resource types. However, these default quotas can be increased on a per-project basis. Check your quota limits and usage in the quota page on the Google Cloud console. If you reach the limit for your resources and need more quota, make a request to increase the quota for certain resources using the IAM quotas page. You can make a request using the Edit Quotas button on the top of the page.

      Compute Engine offers several configurations for your instance. You can also create custom configurations that match your exact instance needs. See the full list of available options on the machine types page.

      No, instances that have been deleted cannot be retrieved. However, if an instance is simply stopped, you can start it again.


      Yes, Compute Engine offers data centers around the world. These data center options are designed to provide low latency connectivity options from those regions. For specific region information, including the geographic location of regions, see regions and zones.

      The Compute Engine Zones section in the Google Cloud console shows the status of each zone. You can also get the status of zones through the command-line tool by running gcloud compute zones list, or through the Compute Engine API with the compute.zones.list method.

      Compute Engine supports several operating system images and third-party images. Additionally, you can create a customized version of an image or build your own image.

      For a list of available regions and zones, see regions and zones.

      Take a look at a longer list of FAQs here.

      More ways to get your questions answered
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