Google has announced immediate availability of Google Compute Engine to the general public at the Google IO 2013. Google Compute Engine is Google’s answer to the Amazon EC2 and other cloud platforms and it lets you to run virtual machines just like Ec2 with multiple configuration options. Compute Engine instances are based on KVM virtualization whereas EC2 is based on XEN. I have decided to signup and see whats inside
Signup page is here and we have to start by adding billing information. Credit Card is required to signup and after signing up, you are immediately taken to the Compute Engine Console where you can create and manage instances and disks.
You can define firewall templates and disk images prior to creating the instance. Console is very simple than the Amazon EC2 console and after selecting the instance size and OS image it creates the instance faster than the EC2 does. Availability of OS images are limited to Centos and Debian.
I’ll do another write up later about getting started with Compute Engine and adding SSH keys etc. I have created the smallest instance available which is named f1micro and it comes with 600MB RAM and access to 1 core.
Here are some of the benchmarks I done,
Connectivity and Disk IO benchmark
Network speeds is average when comparing with the 1Gbps hosts out there but as you can see its fairly consistent on all around US. Its not surprising when thinking about Google’s network. Disk IO is not that good but this is what we should expect from these small instances. Also keep in mind that this isn’t local storage, Google is using SAN to power the persistent images. But you can use scratch disks ( local storage ) while you are creating the instance but its not recommended by Google , Here is the disclaimer that you get when you try to use scratch disks
I’m currently running the serverbear benchmarks on this instance and it seems that this will take very long time 🙂 I’ll update this post when it finishes.
Update : After about 1.5 hours Serverbear test is finished. View the results here . UnixBench scored 410 marks which is poor but its comparable with Amazon’s micro instance. IO latency is good for a SAN setup but read/write speeds aren’t that good.
I hope to write more about how you can get started on Google Compute Engine and start hosting web sites with ease. Please stay subscribed.
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