In April, Google announced expanded virtual machine (VM) offerings, giving users the flexibility to choose the right machine type for your workloads without compromising on price and performance. Today, Google is delighted to share additional updates to VM offerings on Google Compute Engine, with the launch of all new general-purpose VMs in beta, the general availability of compute-optimized VMs, and memory-optimized VMs in beta.

General-purpose VMs with improved price-performance

Compute Engine currently offers flexible general-purpose VMs, with the ability to create custom machine types, add local storage to any predefined or custom VM, and choose from a wide range of CPU platforms.

Starting today, we are adding the 2nd Generation Xeon Scalable Processors to Compute
Engine’s general-purpose machine types. Currently in beta, the new general-purpose machine types (N2) offer greater than 20% price-performance improvement for many workloads and support up to 25% more memory per vCPU compared with first generation N1 machines. N2 machine types run at 2.8GHz base frequency, and 3.4GHz sustained all core turbo.

N2 machine types offer a balance of compute, memory, storage and network resources, making them a great fit for most workloads, including web and application servers, enterprise applications, gaming servers, content and collaboration systems, and most databases.

N2 machine types come with 2 to 80 vCPUs, 1GB to 640GB of memory, and offer up to 8GB:vCPU across both predefined or custom machine shapes so that you can create the best-fit VM for your workloads, preventing resource stranding and helping you optimize your spend.

N2 machine types are currently available in us-central1, europe-west4, asia-southeast1 and will be available in most GCP regions within the next few months.

Compute-optimized VMs for your most demanding applications

If you are running compute-heavy applications with high performance and strict latency requirements, the new compute-optimized (C2) VMs provide the highest performance per core available on Google Cloud, making them a great fit for demanding applications such as high performance computing (HPC), video encoding and massive multiplayer games.

Compute-optimized VMs are now generally available in four regions; us-central1, europe-west4, asia-northeast1 and asia-east1, with expansion planned for us-west2, us-east1, and europe-west2 in the coming weeks. Customers using compute-optimized VMs have been delighted with their performance and price:

“Google’s compute-optimized VM (C2) technology has enabled us to offer our customers the fastest infrastructure in WordPress today. It’s thanks to our strong partnership with Google that we were able to work closely to integrate our technology with theirs and provide the speed, security, intelligence, expertise and award-winning global support to help companies of all sizes win online with WordPress. We are excited to partner with Google Cloud on this achievement and help push the state of the art of what’s possible with WordPress digital experiences for our customers.” – Jason Cohen, Founder and Chief Technology Officer for WP Engine.

“After moving one of our customers to Google Compute Engine C2 VMs we saw a 40% improvement in performance, while using less hardware. One of the critical jobs/processes took 82% less time to complete at 42% less cost.” – Dan Speck, Burwood Group

Memory-optimized VMs now in beta and SAP Certified

With the addition of 6TB and 12TB VMs to GCP’s memory-optimized machine types (M2), SAP customers can run their largest SAP Hana databases on GCP. Now available in beta, these VMs are the largest SAP Certified VMs available from a public cloud provider.

Not only do M2 machine types accommodate the most demanding SAP applications, they also support your favorite GCP features. For SAP systems, uptime is critical for business continuity. With live migration, you can keep your SAP systems up and running even in the face of infrastructure maintenance, upgrades, security patches, and more. And Google Cloud’s flexible committed use discounts let you migrate your growing database from a 4TB instance to the new 6TB VM while leveraging your current memory-optimized commitments.

Getting started

It’s easy to configure and provision the new machine types programmatically, as well as via the console. To learn more about running your C2, M2, and N2 VMs on GCP, check our machine types page and pricing information. Stay up-to-date on additional regions by visiting the available regions and zones page, and go to the GCP Console to get started.