The need for speed: this week on Google Cloud Platform

Posted by Alex Barrett, Editor, Google Cloud Platform Blog


When people start using Google Compute Engine, our infrastructure as a service offering, one of the first things they notice is how fast their VMs boot up. Internally, we’ve clocked VM boot times that are anywhere from two to ten times faster than other cloud providers.

So it’s really nice when the world notices, and validates our work with an independent analysis. In a blog, Kasia Hoffman of Cloud66, an application deployment tool provider, compared the speed of VM creation and SSH access across ten cloud providers, and found that Compute Engine leads the pack, by significant margins for many use cases. You can read the whole report here.

Source: Wikimedia Commons

We also like to do things that are usually slow, fast. Cloud-based cold storage has emerged as a great way to store infrequently used data such as data backups for short money. This Data Center Knowledge report compares cold storage from the three leading providers, including our own Google Cloud Storage Nearline. The takeaway here is that just because you won’t access the data frequently doesn’t mean you won’t want to access it fast when you need it. With Nearline,  you can expect to see data retrieval begin in as little as one second.

Finally, we love stories about how GCP helps folks get things done, fast. With a new site launch right around the corner, Dane Tidwell describes his last-minute decision to switch out the ecommerce engine for the web site for WooCommerce plus WordPress running on GCP. “But hoorah, it works,” he writes. Hoorah, indeed.