Answering the 4 Common FAQs on Compute Engine
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Compute Engine lets you create and run virtual machines (VMs) on Google’s infrastructure, allowing you to launch large compute clusters with ease. When it comes to getting started with Compute Engine, our customers have lots of questions—but some questions come up more often than others.
We looked at an internal list of the most popular Compute Engine documentation pages over a 30-day period to find out what topics were explored by users again and again. Here are the top four questions users have about Compute Engine, in order.
1. What are the different machine families
Compute Engine lets you select the right machine for your needs. You can choose from a curated set of predefined virtual machine (VM) configurations optimized for specific workloads, ranging from small-level purpose to large-scale use cases or create a machine type customized to your needs with our custom machine type feature.
Compute Engine machines are categorized by machine family, including:
- General-purpose: Best price-performance ratio for a variety of standard and cloud-native workloads
- Compute-optimized: Highest performance per core for compute-intensive workloads, such as ad serving or media transcoding
- Memory-optimized: More compute and memory per core than any other family for memory-intensive workloads, such as SAP HANA or in-memory data analytics
- Accelerator-optimized: Designed for your most demanding workloads, such as machine learning (ML) or high performance computing (HPC)
Read the documentation to learn more about each machine family category.
2. How to connect to VMs using advanced methods
In general, we recommend using the Google Cloud Console and the gcloud command-line tool to connect to Linux VM instances. However, some of our customers want to use third-party tools, or require alternative connection configurations.
In these cases, there are several methods that might fit your needs better than the standard connection options:
- Connecting to instances using third-party tools (e.g. Windows PuTTY, Chrome OS Secure Shell app), or MacOS or Linux local terminal)
- Connecting to instances without external IP addresses
- Connecting to instances as the root user Manually connecting between instances and running commands as a service account
Read the documentation to learn about advanced methods for connecting Linux VMs.
3. How to set up OS Login
OS Login lets you use IAM roles and permissions to manage access and permissions to VMs.
OS Login is the recommended way to manage users across multiple instances or projects. OS Login provides:
- Automatic Linux account lifecycle management
- Fine-grained authorization using Google IAM without having to grant broader privileges
- Automatic permissions updates to prevent unwanted access
- Ability to import existing Linux accounts from Active Directory (AD) and Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP)
You can also add an extra layer of security by setting up OS Login with two-factor authentication or manage organization access by setting up organization policies.
Read the documentation to learn how to configure OS login and connect to your instances.
4. How to manage SSH keys in metadata
Compute Engine allows you to manually manage SSH keys and local user accounts by editing public SSH key metadata.
You can add public SSH keys to instance and project metadata using:
- The Google Cloud Console The gcloud command-line tool
- API methods from the Google Cloud Client Libraries
Read the documentation to learn how to manually manage SSH keys and local user accounts in metadata.
Don’t see your question here? Check out the Compute Engine documentation for all of our recommended guides, tutorials, and resources.
7 Fantastic Ways Google Cloud VMWare Engine Stands Out from the Rest for Running VMWare Workloads in the Cloud!
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Google Cloud VMware Engine delivers an enterprise-grade, cloud-native VMware experience that is built on Google Cloud’s highly performant and scalable infrastructure. By enabling a consistent VMware experience, the service allows customers to adopt Google Cloud rapidly, easily, and with minimal modifications to their vSphere workloads, bringing the best of VMware and Google Cloud together on one platform for a variety of use-cases. These include rapid data center exit, application lift and shift, disaster recovery, virtual desktop infrastructure, or modernization at your own pace.
Here are seven ways VMware Engine outshines alternatives for running your VMware workloads in the cloud, simplify your operations, and help you innovate faster:
- Dedicated 100Gbps east-west networking
Google Cloud VMware Engine nodes come with redundant switching and dedicated 100Gbps east-west networking with no oversubscription of bandwidth, unlike other options where there is generally oversubscription. This is especially important when it comes to running latency-sensitive workloads. - Four 9’s of availability in a single zone
The service offers 99.99% uptime SLA for a cluster in a single Zone with five to 16 nodes and FTT=2 or more without the need for stretched clusters, which is higher than the alternatives. Further, dedicated connectivity for core service functions such as vSAN and vMotion enables better solution stability and availability. This enables the service to support the needs of enterprise workloads that require high availability.
Note: “Cluster” means a deployment of three or more dedicated bare metal nodes running VMware ESXi and associated networking managed via management interfaces.
- Global networking without complex routing
Google Cloud VMware Engine networking is built based on Google Cloud’s powerful networking architecture. With simplified regional and global routing modes—which allow a VPC’s subnets to be deployed in any region where our service is available—you can architect global networks without the need or overhead of creating and connecting regional network designs. You get instant, direct Layer 3 access between them. In alternative cloud environments, you may have to configure special networking between regions, often requiring VPN-based tunnels over the WAN to enable global uniform network communication. This adds to the deployment and operational complexity, in addition to cost. - Integrated multi-VPC networking
Users often have application deployments in different VPC networks, such as separate dev/test and production environments or multiple administrative domains across business units. The service supports “many-to-many” access from VPC networks to Google Cloud VMware Engine networks with multi-VPC networking, allowing you to retain existing deployed architectures and extend them flexibly to your VMware environments. In addition, by providing multi-VPC networking, you can pool their VMware needs—say for QA and dev—to a smaller set of clusters, effectively reducing their costs.
For more information about the end-to-end networking capabilities and services available in Google Cloud VMware Engine, please refer to the Private Cloud Networking for Google Cloud VMware Engine whitepaper. Here, you’ll find details about network flows, configuration options, and the differentiated benefits of running your VMware workloads in Google Cloud.
- Unified, cloud-integrated model
Google Cloud VMware Engine is a fully managed Google first-party service, operated and supported by Google and its world-class team. With fully integrated identities, billing, and access control, you have a simpler end-to-end experience that is different from other services. You access Google Cloud VMware Engine service via the Google Cloud console, like any other Google Cloud service. You can also access other native Google Cloud services privately from your VMware private cloud running in Google Cloud VMware Engine over local connections. - Flexibility in third-party ecosystem compatibility
With Google Cloud VMware Engine, you can set up existing VMware on-premises third-party tools or products that require additional privileges by using a solution user account. This uniquely enables operational consistency, ensuring that the tools you have invested in and used over the years work on Google Cloud VMware Engine. Furthermore, in key areas such as vSAN data encryption, you have the choice of not only using Google Cloud Key Management Service (KMS)—which is turned on by default on vSAN datastores—but also external KMS providers such as HyTrust, Thales, and Fortanix. - Dense nodes with high storage:core and memory:core ratios and fast provisioning
Google Cloud VMware Engine nodes are dense. Each node is powered by Intel® Xeon® Scalable Processors and comes with 36 cores, 72 hyperthreaded cores, 768 GB memory, 19.2 TB NVMe data and 3.2 TB NVMe cache storage. This, along with oversubscription, leads to high consolidation ratios and compelling storage:core per dollar and memory:core per dollar. In addition, you can rapidly spin up these nodes in a VMware private cloud often in under an hour, enabling on-demand, VMware-consistent capacity in Google Cloud for your needs.
These are just a few examples of customer-centric innovation that set Google Cloud VMware Engine infrastructure apart. In addition, migrating to Google cloud can save you up to 38% in TCO. Get started by learning about Google Cloud VMware Engine and your options for migration, or talk to our sales team to join the customers who have embarked upon this journey.
The authors would like to thank the Google Cloud VMware Engine product team for their contributions on this blog.
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A well-executed digital transformation should do much more than keep you competitive… it should also position you to excel by untethering IT staff from low value, labor-intensive tasks, allowing them to focus on innovation and high-impact projects.
Also, replacing (or supplementing) legacy systems with modern technologies can reduce complexity and cost, while also positioning you to leverage cloud-native tools to achieve enhanced business intelligence and key strategic insights.
Finally, with nearly unlimited scalability at your fingertips, applications can scale up and scale down on demand, while you pay only for what you consume. This allows you to maintain a continuously right-sized cost profile, while also accelerating development and reducing procurement cycles.
Download this whitepaper to get a simple, prescriptive guidance to assist with the most important part of your digital transformation: the beginning.
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Fitbit’s Zero-Downtime Migration to GCP
In 2019, Fitbit moved all of its production operations from managed hosting to Google Cloud Platform without any downtime. The Fitbit experience is provided by a monolithic application backed by 200+ data stores, making the task of moving service by service impossible.
So, Fitbit decided to run services in both hosting environments and move user by user. This is the story of Fitbit’s migration to GCP, which was tested and executed mostly in production, without any effects to the users.
The tale starts with a review of goals and requirements for the migration. What should the user experience be during this period? How would we know if we are meeting that benchmark and can push forward? How would we slow or reverse migration if things weren’t going well? Answering these questions led us to a migration plan that started with the movement of internal users, followed by the careful transplant of a small number of real customers, and concluded with a mass migration of the majority of our users.
This migration path required significant new additions to Fitbit’s architecture, including new testing, routing, and caching techniques. As the journey approached its conclusion, we recognized that these methods were not merely allowing us to migrate; they were allowing Fitbit to operate in multiple hosting environments simultaneously. The lessons from this migration have provided the foundation for a mutli-region architecture that will unlock the full potential of life in Google Cloud Platform.
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In this whitepaper, we outline migration frameworks that we built based on conversations we’ve had with CIOs, CTOs, and their technical staff. The goal of these frameworks is to help you devise a migration strategy that empowers both IT and the business.
Learn how to analyze migration strategies for your business, including:
- Moving up the stack before you migrate
- Migrating workloads into the cloud (mostly) as is
- Optimizing and modernizing workloads once you’ve migrated
Google Cloud and Ericsson to Deliver 5G and Edge Cloud Solutions
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Editor’s note: 5G is much more than a network—it’s a platform for innovation with the ability to provide immediate global scale and enable use cases that we haven’t even dreamed of yet. But to achieve this, industry players must come together to drive this growing ecosystem. Today, Erik Ekudden, CTO of Ericsson, and Bikash Koley, VP of Global Networking at Google Cloud, share their insights into the potential of edge and 5G.
Experts consider 2021 to be the year that serves as the inflection point between network readiness and 5G availability. However, communications service providers (CSPs) are still faced with the task of modernizing their networks, systems, and infrastructure to maximize the potential of 5G for themselves and for the enterprise customers they serve. As you weigh whether to tackle this challenge, let’s first examine what’s different about 5G and how CSPs can best leverage 5G and the edge together as an even stronger platform for innovation than just 5G alone.
With 5G, applications and mobile networks are no longer isolated
Let’s first address what 5G brings to the table. Faster speeds and lower latency are expected of course, and throughout the evolution from 2G to 3G to 4G, there’s been a step function in performance improvements with each of these. However, with every generation, applications and networks have been like ships passing in the night. Networks have been unaware of what the applications have been doing and applications have been guessing what the network was capable of.
What’s different this time around is that there is some real innovation happening with the development and rollout of 5G itself. The network is on a path to become more accessible via APIs so that applications can call on and consume what they need from the networks in a more programmable way. This sets us up for more open architectures and ecosystems.
5G leverages a more open architecture
One key difference with 5G as compared to prior generations is that it’s the most open and flexible network architecture the CSP industry has seen. This is thanks to its service-based approach and the decoupling of hardware and software components. CSPs are now running core network elements in the public cloud, private cloud, hybrid cloud, and even multi-cloud, which was unthinkable even five years ago.
The flexibility of this more open architecture allows us to push the cloud to the edge while still being able to manage it from a single pane of glass. This is a huge leap forward from traditional networks, which have been domain-specific, managed in silos, and with slow service creation and delivery. Now, hyperscale cloud vendors and network equipment providers are offering solutions that help CSPs break down these silos to enable more flexible, automated networks with improved orchestration, visibility, and control across multi-vendor, multi-cloud and hyperscale cloud-provider environments. In addition, the separation of hardware and software provides a much more flexible and cost-effective way to upgrade from one network generation to the next.
To provide solutions that are relevant to enterprises, CSPs must offer capabilities beyond connectivity. Enterprise service orchestration, including exposure of network assets and network slicing, are foundational capabilities to provide value to the application ecosystem and be in control of the network and the delivered services.
Combining 5G and edge to help industries reimagine user experiences
This convergence of compute, storage and networking at the edge coming together for the first time will enable CSPs and enterprises to offer their customers completely reimagined user experiences. Consider, for example, how the automotive industry might enhance how customers shop for a car. As part of Fiat Chrysler Automobiles’ Virtual Showroom at the recent CES 2021 event, consumers were able to experience the innovative new 2021 Jeep Wrangler 4xe by scanning a QR code with their phones, and then see an Augmented Reality (AR) model of the Wrangler right in front of them—virtually placed on their own driveway or in any open space.
By rendering the model in Google Cloud, then streaming it to mobile devices, visitors could also see what the car looked like from any angle, in different colors, and even step inside to see the interior in incredible detail. That is the true digitization of an industry segment and highlights the device-to-network-to-edge-to-cloud application relationship and how it can impact the user experience.
A programmable network unlocks more application use cases
The programmability of the 5G network will truly enable application developers to utilize all the benefits of the underlying network. Programmability supports ease of use and enables CSPs, integrated software vendors (ISVs) and the ecosystem to have the right network-level APIs exposed so that applications can be optimized based on the network behavior and vice versa. Imagine, for instance, automatically pushing applications from a cloud region to the edge based on network latency and performance metrics.
Finally, 5G’s programmability is also about having the right tools available for developers to build and integrate applications on the network with zero-touch onboarding and validation. With this, we’ve come to the point where the network is now a “platform” for application innovation.
5G and edge will be all about the ecosystem
One thing is for certain: the shift to 5G will place tremendous focus on the ecosystem, and it needs to be an ecosystem that includes CSPs, public cloud providers, application developers and technology providers, all coming together to optimize the user experiences across industry applications. For instance, Google Cloud and Ericsson recently announced our partnership to deliver 5G and edge cloud solutions for CSPs and enterprise. In addition, Google Cloud is also teaming up with popular ISVs to deliver more than 200 edge applications from 30-plus partners, all running on our cloud.
With collaboration across ISVs, cloud providers and network equipment providers, we are enabling the rapid delivery and deployment of new vertical services and applications, leveraging capabilities like Anthos, artificial intelligence (AI), and machine learning (ML), as well as multi-vendor, multi-cloud and hyperscale cloud provider service orchestration and global edge networks such as those provided by Google and telecom service providers.
As members of the technology ecosystem, we talk about compute, storage and networking, but when it comes down to it, it’s about optimally placing these resources—whether in the cloud, at the provider core, at the edge or anywhere in between—to maximize the end-user experience. The openness and programmability of 5G lends itself to collaboration like never before. We predict that in 2022 and beyond, it will be all about the ecosystem coming together to leverage 5G and the edge to build innovations that we can’t yet imagine.
To learn more, watch the full Ericsson 5G Things CTO Focus fireside chat, where we discuss these topics and more.
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