Hands-On Machine Learning on Google Cloud Platform
上QQ阅读APP看书，第一时间看更新
上一章目录下一章

Google Compute Engine

Simply put, GCE is a service that lets you create and run VMs on Google infrastructure. The GCE allows you to launch spin up VMs with the right operating system, size, RAM, and the appropriate number of CPUs or GPUs for your needs. It is the equivalent of AWS EC2.

The GCE was announced on June 28, 2012, at Google I/O 2012 and made available to the general public on May 15, 2013. Compared to AWS EC2, an equivalent product, the GCE is a rather new service:

The following extracts from the release notes timeline illustrate the rapid evolution of the GCE service from a simple contender to a fully fledged player in the Cloud computing domain:

  • May 15, 2013: GCE is available for everyone.
  • August 6, 2013: GCE launches load balancing.
  • December 3, 2013: GCE is announced as being production ready. Users can now feel confident using Compute Engine to support mission-critical workloads with 24/7 support and a 99.95% monthly SLA.
  • June 25, 2014: Solid-State Drives (SSD) persistent disks are now available in general availability and open to all users and projects.
  • September 08, 2015: Pre-emptible instances are now generally available to all users and projects.
  • March 30, 2016: Persistent disks larger than 10 TB are generally available.
  • July 1, 2016: Shutdown scripts are now generally available to use with compute engine instances.
  • September 21, 2017: NVIDIA? Tesla? K80 GPUs are now generally available.
  • September 26, 2017: Billing increments for GCE VM instances are reduced from per-minute increments to per-second increments.
  • The most recent news at the time of writing this is the launch in beta of a staggering 96-vCPUs machine types.

In the past four years, Google has been steadily improving and developing its GCE offer at a rapid pace by:

  • Expanding regions
  • Adding more powerful machines and Intel CPU platforms
  • Adding roles and features
  • Steadily releasing new public images for Windows, Suse, CentOS, Debian, Ubuntu, RHEL, or CoreOS

As the timeline illustrates, the GCE service is a young and dynamic service that embraces the evolution of its customers needs and anticipates them with bold new offers. It reflects Google's drive to become a leader in the Cloud computing business and potentially offset Amazon's lead in Cloud computing.

Before we launch our first GCE VM, let's cover a few important concepts.

上一章目录下一章