(...)Google Compute Engine was opened to the public in June 2012, a bit later than most other players in the cloud marketplace. Arrival time aside, it is a powerful, scalable, and performant IaaS solution.
Compute Engine allows you quickly and easily to create anything from a simple single-node VM to a large-scale compute cluster on Google's world class infrastructure. As of this writing, it supports several stellar open source Linux distributions (and one closed-source option), including Debian and CentOS; CoreOS, FreeBSD, and SELinux [2]; and Red Hat Enterprise Linux, SUSE, and Windows [3].
Instances are available with many options and are completely customizable from a hardware perspective. You can choose the number of cores, RAM, and other machine properties, and you can scale them as you grow [4]. Virtual instances start at a micro instance (f1-micro), with one core and 0.60GB of memory, and go up to 16 cores and 104GB of RAM. For the sake of the demo here, I will be using a shared core micro instance (g1-small; Table 2). Competition from Amazon, Microsoft, Rackspace, and others in the cloud marketplace has put increasing downward pressure on the price of many cloud offerings.(...)