What is Compute Engine?

Compute Engine is a computing and hosting service that lets you create and run virtual machines on Google infrastructure. Compute Engine offers scale, performance, and value that lets you easily launch large compute clusters on Google’s infrastructure. There are no upfront investments, and you can run thousands of virtual CPUs on a system that offers quick, consistent performance.

Google Cloud Documentation

As described above, it’s Google Cloud’s service to host virtual machines. This service compares to Amazon EC2 and Azure Compute. There is lot to cover, in time I hope to cover more. For now, I aim to give high level thoughts, base concepts, and general knowledge on Compute Engine.

How are Virtual Machines Priced?

Pricing for Google virtual machines is straight forward. You pay based on time for vCPUs, GPUs, and RAM. You will be charged for at least a minute, after the first minute you are charged for each 1 second increment after.

I’ll give you a couple of examples. First, if you run a virtual machine for 47 seconds, you will be charged for 1 minute. Second, if you ran another virtual machine for 3 minutes and 05 seconds, you’d be charged for 185 seconds. The charge for the first minute the following seconds will be based on the machine type you’ve chosen for the virtual machine.

You should also know that this cost of the virtual machine doesn’t include the cost of things like disks and networking. Those costs are charged independently. You will also get sustained use discounts for prolonged used of virtual machines in Compute Engine.

Here are some pricing resources:

• Virtual Machine Pricing
• Disk and Image Pricing
• Network Pricing
• Google Cloud Pricing Calculator
• Choose The Right Compute Engine Machine Type

Migrating Virtual Machines to Google Compute Engine

Creating new virtual machines in Compute Engine is very straight forward. But, what if you want to move existing virtual machines to Compute Engine? You can migrate physical machines and virtual machines from VMware vSphere, AWS, and Azure with Migrate for Compute Engine. There are two different versions 4.x and 5 of Migrate for Compute Engine. Their are some differences between each version and I suggest you research what you should use before jumping down the rabbit hole.

The concept is pretty easy to follow:

1. Install and configure a connector in your environment
2. Connect to Google Compute Engine
3. Migrate the virtual machines

The below documentation details the process in full. There are other steps that need to be taken. You will need to configure your GCP Project, Virtual Private Cloud (VPC), Interconnects, and more. I’m mostly trying to give you a taste of what you can do with Compute Engine.

• Migrate for Compute Engine Overview
• Migrate for Compute Engine Version Comparison
• Migrate for Compute Engine 4.x Documentation
• Migrate for Compute Engine 5.x Documentation

How Compute Engine Compares to AWS and Azure

Below is a list provided by Google that compares all of its compute features to the two other major cloud providers.