- Per-Second Billing: Google Compute Engine offers per-second billing for instances, which means you pay only for the exact amount of time your instances are running. This feature allows you to optimize costs for short-lived workloads and save money when compared to traditional hourly billing models.
- GPUs and TPUs: GCE supports attaching GPUs (Graphics Processing Units) and TPUs (Tensor Processing Units) to instances for running machine learning, scientific simulations, rendering, and other high-performance computing workloads. These specialized hardware accelerators can significantly improve the performance of compute-intensive tasks.
- Instance Templates: Instance templates define the configuration of instances, such as machine type, image, disk, and network settings. You can use instance templates to create multiple instances with the same configuration and ensure consistency across your environment.
- Deployment Manager: Deployment Manager is an infrastructure management service that helps you automate the creation and management of Google Cloud resources using declarative configurations. You can use Deployment Manager to create, update, and delete instances, disks, and other GCE resources.
- Container-Optimized OS: Container-Optimized OS is a lightweight, secure, and minimal operating system provided by Google for running Docker containers on GCE instances. It is optimized for performance, security, and easy updates, making it an ideal choice for running containerized applications.
- License Mobility: License Mobility allows you to bring your existing software licenses, such as Microsoft SQL Server or Oracle Database, to GCE instances. This feature enables you to reduce costs and leverage your existing investments when migrating workloads to the cloud.
- Compute Engine SLA: Google Compute Engine offers a Service Level Agreement (SLA) that guarantees a certain level of availability for instances. The SLA specifies a monthly uptime percentage and provides service credits if the commitment is not met.
- Regions and Zones: GCE instances can be deployed in multiple regions and zones worldwide, ensuring low latency, high availability, and fault tolerance. Understanding how to choose the right region and zone for your instances can help you optimize performance and costs.
- Billing Export: GCE integrates with Google Cloud Billing to provide detailed billing information for your instances and other resources. You can export your billing data to BigQuery for analysis or use the Cloud Console to visualize your costs and set up budgets and alerts.
- Some useful command of GCP Compute Engine
| Service | Command Group | Common Actions | Full CLI Commands |
| Compute Engine | gcloud compute instances | Create instance | gcloud compute instances create INSTANCE_NAME –zone ZONE –machine-type MACHINE_TYPE –image-family IMAGE_FAMILY –image-project IMAGE_PROJECT |
| List instances | gcloud compute instances list | ||
| Describe instance | gcloud compute instances describe INSTANCE_NAME –zone ZONE | ||
| Start instance | gcloud compute instances start INSTANCE_NAME –zone ZONE | ||
| Stop instance | gcloud compute instances stop INSTANCE_NAME –zone ZONE | ||
| Delete instance | gcloud compute instances delete INSTANCE_NAME –zone ZONE | ||
| gcloud compute instance-templates | Create instance template | gcloud compute instance-templates create TEMPLATE_NAME –machine-type MACHINE_TYPE –image-family IMAGE_FAMILY –image-project IMAGE_PROJECT | |
| List instance templates | gcloud compute instance-templates list | ||
| Delete instance template | gcloud compute instance-templates delete TEMPLATE_NAME | ||
| gcloud compute instance-groups | Create managed instance group | gcloud compute instance-groups managed create INSTANCE_GROUP_NAME –template TEMPLATE_NAME –size SIZE –zone ZONE | |
| List managed instance groups | gcloud compute instance-groups managed list | ||
| Delete managed instance group | gcloud compute instance-groups managed delete INSTANCE_GROUP_NAME –zone ZONE |
