Compute Choices – VMs and the Google Compute Engine

In the cloud world, the most hands-on of these approaches is not really an option—you are not going to actually own the machines, and physically maintain them. That is the whole point of switching to the cloud—that the cloud provider manages scaling for you and allows you to pay as you go. But a cloud equivalent of this approach still exists—you could provision a large number of virtual machines (again, these machines are virtual, not physical), and run your app on all of these. You'd be able to log in to these machines, and you'd have to manage scaling up or down (by provisioning more or less VMs). The cloud provider is still providing you with very valuable services—you can autoscale your groups of VMs, you can have your VMs stay live during system maintenance, and so on. These services...