Google Compute Engine review

You're sitting around. You have some computing to do. Ten years ago, you would ask your boss to buy a rack or two of computers to churn through the data. Today, you just call up the cloud and rent the systems by the minute. This is the market that Google is now chasing by packaging up time on its racks of machines and calling it the Google Compute Engine.

Google took its sweet time entering this corner of the cloud. While Amazon, Rackspace, and others started off with pay-as-you-go Linux boxes and other "infrastructure" services, Google began with the Google App Engine, a nice stack of Python that held your hand and did much of the work for you. Now Google is heading in the more general direction and renting raw machines too. The standard distro is Ubuntu 12.04, but CentOS instances are also available. And you can store away your own custom image once you configure it.

Google's big selling point 

Why rent machines from Google instead of Amazon or Rackspace or some other IaaS provider? Google claims its raw machines are cheaper. This is a bit hard to determine with any precision because not everyone is selling the same thing despite claims of computing becoming a commodity. Google sells its machines by the Google Compute Engine Unit (GCEU), which it estimates is about a 1GHz to 1.2GHz Opteron from 2007.

All of Google's machines rent for 5.3 cents per GCEU per hour, but that isn't really what you pay. The smallest machine you can rent from Google today, the so-called n1-standard-1-d, goes for 14.5 cents per hour. That's because the n1-standard-1-d - which comes with one virtual core, 3.75GB of RAM, and 420GB of disk space - is equivalent to 2.75 GCEUs, according to Google. You can get machines with two, four, and eight virtual cores all at the same price per GCEU.

These numbers are bound to evolve soon according to a member of the Google Compute Engine team. The product is said to be in "limited preview," and as it grows more polished, the company will probably experiment with adding more options with more or less power.

Is 5.3 cents per GCEU a good deal? It depends upon what you want to do with your machine. Rackspace prices its machines by the amount of RAM you get. It has stopped selling the anemic 256MB RAM VMs, but rents its 512MB boxes at only 2.2 cents per hour or $16.06 per month. If you want a machine with 4GB from Rackspace, it will cost you 24 cents each hour, about $175 per month. 

Is that a better deal? If your computation doesn't need the RAM, a basic instance from Rackspace is much cheaper. Even if the CPU might not be as powerful, you would be better off with a cheaper machine. But I suspect many will need fatter machines because modern operating systems suck up RAM like a blue whale sucks up krill.