Google Compute Engine Availability Opened Up

Last year at Google I/O, Google unveiled Compute Engine. Today, the company announced they’re making it available for anyone to start using.

They’re also adding the following new features:

• Sub-hour billing charges for instances in one-minute increments with a ten-minute minimum, so you don’t pay for compute minutes that you don’t use
• Shared-core instances provide smaller instance shapes for low-intensity workloads
• Advanced Routing features help you create gateways and VPN servers, and enable you to build applications that span your local network and Google’s cloud
• Large persistent disks support up to 10 terabytes per volume, which translates to 10X the industry standard

In somewhat related news, Google has also made App Engine 1.8.0 available. It includes a limited preview of the PHP runtime (apparently the top requested feature).

“We’re bringing one of the most popular web programming languages to App Engine so that you can run open source apps like WordPress,” says Google’s Urs Hölzle. “It also offers deep integration with other parts of Cloud Platform including Google Cloud SQL and Cloud Storage.”

Google also introduced Google Cloud Datastore, a solution for non-relational data.

“Based on the popular App Engine High Replication Datastore, Cloud Datastore is a standalone service that features automatic scalability and high availability while still providing powerful capabilities such as ACID transactions, SQL-like queries, indexes and more,” explains Hölzle.

More on all of the Google Cloud Platform news here.