Five Unique Features Of Google Compute Engine That No IaaS Provider Could Match

Google Compute Engine (GCE), the infrastructure service of Google Cloud Platform, is a late entrant in the market. Amazon EC2 was announced in 2006 while Microsoft added VMs to Azure in 2012. Google announced the general availability of GCE only in late 2013.

Despite being the laggard in the IaaS segment, GCE enjoys certain differentiating capabilities that the competition could not match. Here are five features that showcase the engineering brilliance of Google.

1. Sustained Usage Discounts

Infrastructure utilization dictates the economies of scale in the IaaS business. In a lot of ways, it is similar to the aviation industry where the operational cost is reduced with the increase in passengers. Since the IaaS providers invest in the infrastructure capacity upfront, they need to ensure the best possible resource utilization. To encourage customers to run their workloads for a longer term, cloud providers offer infrastructure at a lower price than the on-demand price. Amazon EC2 Reserved Instances feature is an example of such pricing schemes. Microsoft offers 5 percent discount on Azure when a customer commits to a 12-month term.

In the initial days, it was simple to understand the concept of reserved instances, but with the growing demand and evolving usage patterns, Amazon made it complex and confusing. The customer has to spend more time to calculate the reserved instance pricing than choosing the right EC2 instance type.

As the name implies, Google Compute Engine’s sustained usage discounts reward customers for their sustained usage of compute resources. Unlike EC2 or Azure VMs, the customer need not commit for long-term to enjoy reduced pricing. Even on-demand GCE VMs will get the benefit of sustained usage discounts. All the customer needs to do is to keep running the VM for an entire month. At the end of the billing cycle, Google automatically adds the discount to the bill. The discount increases with usage with customers getting up to a 30% net discount for instances that run the entire month.

Even if the customer doesn’t run the same VM for the whole month, Google treats multiple, non-overlapping instances running the same region and zone as one VM to apply the discount. Such instances are called inferred instances in GCE terminology.

This feature blurs the line between on-demand pricing and reserved pricing by offering discounted price to all the GCE customers. No other IaaS provider could match Google in offering sustained usage discounts. The closest that comes to this feature is EC2 CPU credits which are available only for T2 instance family that come with burstable performance.

Read the entire article at Forbes

Janakiram MSV is an analyst, advisor, and architect. Follow him on Twitter,  Facebook and LinkedIn.