Google Outsmarts Competition With Custom Machine Types In The Cloud

Microsoft Azure is no different in overwhelming the customers. It has over 30 VM types with varied capabilities and pricing options but with very little guidance on choosing the right configuration.  Like most of its competitors, Google has a choice of 18 predefined machine types that offer varying power of CPU, memory and storage across 4 categories. Each machine type has its own pricing and is billed separately. For example, customers running transactional databases choose from high-memory machine types while running the development and test workloads on standard machine types.

 

The challenge comes when customers try to map their on-premises server configuration with the available machine types. In most of the cases, they settle for a configuration that’s only a close match but not a symmetrical match. That’s where Google Compute Engine custom machine types come into the play. Customers can create a machine type with the number of cores and memory that mimics their existing server configuration…

This feature works great for workloads that need raw computing power or maximum RAM without the frills. Google decides the hourly pricing based on the number of virtual CPUs and RAM measured in the multiples of 1GB. Each vCPU per hour costs $0.03492 while 1GB of memory is $0.00468. Customers can also choose to launch the VMs in preemptible mode which is cheaper than the regular, on-demand pricing…

Read more from the source @ http://www.forbes.com/sites/janakirammsv/2015/11/29/google-outsmarts-competition-with-custom-machine-types-in-the-cloud/