Google Compute Engine now with Lower Pricing and More Features

The Compute Engine is Google’s initiative to offer infrastructure as a service (IaaS). The product will be competing with Amazon Web Services which has been in the market for a while. Google officials announced the availability of the product to the public at Google’s I/O conference in 2012.

Google Compute Engine will be available at $400 a month for customers who sign up for the Gold Support package. A 4% price reduction will also be made on all Compute Engine packages.

According to an analysis published by GigaOM, the Compute Engine is 4 to 10 times faster than Amazon EC2 in some tests.

Google lists some functionality added to Compute Engine in a blog post including:

– Five new instance type families (diskless versions of our standard instance types, plus diskful and diskless versions of high-memory and high-cpu configurations), with 16 new instance types.
– Two new supported zones in Europe, which provide lower latency and higher performance for our European customers. We’ve also made it easy to migrate virtual machine instances from one zone to another via an enhancement to our gcutil command line tool.

A great example of an application running on Compute Engine is a game developed by the Chrome team. The game, World Wide Maze Chrome Experiment converts any website into an interactive 3D maze navigated via your smartphone.The synchronization and game state are managed by Compute Engine virtual machines running Node.js.