Access Google Cloud Platform products from your code Cloud APIs

Access Google Cloud Platform products from your code. Cloud APIs provide similar functionality to Cloud SDK and Cloud Console, and allow you to automate your workflows by using your favorite language. Use these Cloud APIs with REST calls or client libraries in popular programming languages.

High-performance, scalable VMs
Compute Engine delivers virtual machines running in Google's innovative data centers and worldwide fiber network. Compute Engine's tooling and workflow support enable scaling from single instances to global, load-balanced cloud computing.

Compute Engine's VMs boot quickly, come with persistent disk storage, and deliver consistent performance. Our virtual servers are available in many configurations, including predefined sizes or the option to create custom machine types optimized for your specific needs. Flexible pricing and automatic sustained-use discounts make Compute Engine the leader in price/performance.

Industry-leading price and performance
Compute Engine VMs boot quickly and are consistently high performance. Compute Engine also offers industry-leading local SSD performance. Compare throughput on equivalent IaaS offerings and see the difference our virtual servers can make for your workloads. For extra performance training and running machine learning models, leverage Cloud TPU or GPU.

Low cost, automatic discounts
Google bills in second-level increments, so you only pay for the compute time you use. With sustained-use discounts, we automatically give you discounted prices for long-running workloads with no up-front commitment required.

Fast and efficient networking
Create large compute clusters that benefit from strong and consistent cross-machine bandwidth. Connect to machines in other data centers and to other Google services using Google's private global fiber network. Create an instance, check the network configs, and run some tests.

Environmentally friendly global network
Our infrastructure is entirely carbon neutral. Our global network of data centers consumes 50% less energy than the typical data center, and we purchase enough renewable energy to match 100% of the energy consumed by our global operations. We are growing our global data center footprint so your applications can run closer to your customers and distribute geographically for resiliency.

Flexibility for Every Workload
Resize your clusters, create machine images, virtualize your network, use preemptible VMs for batch workloads, and create custom machine types to optimize for your specific needs. Our pricing model won't lock you into obsolete machine types with up-front agreements.

Features
Predefined machine types
Compute Engine offers predefined virtual machine configurations for every need from micro instances to instances with up to 160 vCPUs and 3.75 TB of memory.

Custom machine types
Create virtual machines with the shape (i.e. vCPU and memory) that is right for your workloads. By tailoring a Custom Machine Type to your specific needs you can realize significant savings.

Persistent disks
Network storage, up to 64 TB in size, can be attached to VMs as persistent disks. You can create persistent disks in HDD or SSD formats. If a VM instance is terminated, its persistent disk retains data and can be attached to another instance. You can also take snapshots of your persistent disk and create new persistent disks from that snapshot.

Local SSD
Compute Engine offers always-encrypted local solid-state drive (SSD) block storage. Unlike standard persistent disks, local SSDs are physically attached to the server hosting the virtual machine instance offering very high input/output operations per second (IOPS) and very low latency compared to persistent disks. Local SSD sizes up to 3 TB are available for any VM with at least 1 vCPU.

Transparent maintenance
Our innovative datacenters and live migration technology enable proactive infrastructure maintenance, improving reliability and security. Your live VMs are automatically moved to nearby hosts, even if your VMs are under extreme load, while underlying host machines undergo maintenance. You won't have to reboot your VMs due to host software updates or even some classes of detectable hardware failure.

Global load balancing
Global load-balancing technology helps you distribute incoming requests across pools of instances across multiple regions, so you can achieve maximum performance, throughput, and availability at low cost.

Linux and Windows support
Run your choice of OS, including Debian, CentOS, 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 Platform community or bring your own.

Batch processing
Cost-effectively run large compute and batch jobs using preemptible VMs. Fixed pricing and no contracts or reservations make it easy: simply check a box when you create the VM and turn them off when the work is done.

Compliance and security
All data written to persistent disk in Compute Engine is encrypted on the fly and then transmitted and stored in encrypted form. Compute Engine has completed ISO 27001, SSAE-16, SOC 1, SOC 2, and SOC 3 certifications, demonstrating our commitment to information security.

Per-second billing
Google bills in second-level increments. You pay only for the compute time that you use.

Automatic discounts
With sustained-use discounts, we automatically give you discounted prices for long-running workloads with no sign-up fees or up-front commitment.

Commitment savings
With committed-use discounts you can save up to 57% with no up-front costs or instance-type lock-in.

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

Since no existing cloud rendering solution could address our needs at that scale, we decided to develop our own software atop Google Cloud Platform. Google's efficiency, availability of resources, and per-second billing formed the back-end of a product we call Conductor.

Pricing for Compute Engine is based on per-second usage. You can try Compute Engine for free. The Google Cloud Platform Free Tier offers you free usage of one f1-micro VM instance per month from North America, excluding Northern Virginia. This includes 30 GB of standard persistent disk storage per month and 5 GB of snapshot storage per month. Once your free trial is over, you will be billed only for the resources you continue to use. To learn more visit the Compute Engine pricing page.