Although it has been in test mode for a year and already serves well-known players including Red Hat and Snapchat, Google has now officially rolled out its IaaS (infrastructure-as-a-service) Google Compute Engine (GCE) as a commercial service that will compete with Amazon Web Services (AWS) and other platforms. There are new lower prices for using the GCE platform and Service Level Agreements (SLAs) guarantee close to 100 percent availability.
There are some unique aspects to Google Compute Engine, including the fact that Google offers pay-as-you-go pricing billed in 10-minute increments. Google has lowered the price for standard instances by 10 percent. As an example, the price of a standard one core instance is now $0.104 per hour. There are also new 16-core instances for heavy computational needs.
