Virtual machines on Google Compute Engine (GCE)
The fundamental resource of Compute Engine is (no surprise) virtual machines, generally referred to as Compute Engine instances. Compute Engine instances are composed of several components, including the following:
- A boot disk created from an image or snapshot
- Compute resources, including vCPU and RAM
- Additional persistent storage
- Network interfaces
- GPUs and local SSDs
Machine types
Virtual machines on Compute Engine are available in a number of configurations, known as machine types. Machine types can be categorized by use case as well as scale, where use case determines relative resource allocations (for example, more memory than vCPU), and scale represents total resource allocation for that type (for example, 4 GB of RAM per 2 vCPU).
Note
Compute Engine and other GCP compute options allocate CPU resources in the form of virtual CPUs (vCPUs). The underlying hardware backing each vCPU depends slightly on the VM's machine type, but in general each vCPU...
