Google Announces Compute Engine for Linux Virtualization

During a keynote at the I/O conference, Google announced Google Compute Engine, a cloud platform on which Linux virtual machines can be run. This puts Google in direct competition with Amazon EC2 and Microsoft Azure.

Compute Engine was announced by Urs Hölzle, vice president of technical infrastructure at the search giant. The service should make it possible to run virtual machines based on the Linux operating system within Google’s cloud infrastructure.

According to Hölzle, the service, which is still available as beta for a limited number of users, would offer up to 50 percent more computing power per dollar than ‘the competition’. Google is indirectly referring to the rates charged by Amazon. Virtual machines running within Compute Engine could also effortlessly switch up to hundreds of thousands of cores. In a demo, a medical application was shown that would use 600,000 cores.

A Linux VM within Compute Cloud can be allocated one to eight virtual cores with a maximum of 3.75GB RAM per core, Google reports. Storage is through Google Cloud Storage or a dedicated storage volume in the form of a persistent block device. Furthermore, Google promises stable performance and remote control of virtual machines via a cli interface with support for scripting or using a web interface.

The arrival of an infrastructure-as-a-service service by Google comes as no surprise; There have been rumors for some time about plans by the search giant to compete directly with Amazon EC2 and Microsoft Azure. In addition, Google already has some irons in the cloud fire with its App Engine service for running web applications, storage via Google Cloud Storage and the analytics tool BigQuery.