Google announced the release of a limited preview edition of Google Compute Engine. Google says: ‘Run your large-scale computing workloads on Linux virtual machines hosted on Google’s infrastructure’ The offering is based on Linux virtual machines running on thousands of Google boxes. The first such services were already offered around 2004 and the first large scale such services were offered by Amazon in 2006.
What differentiates the Google offer completely, from any other hosting provider out there, is the pricing: Starting at R1.16 for a single core processor virtual machine with 3.75GB RAM, the entire cost model has changed. The average cost anywhere for a single core, with much less RAM, is a lot more expensive than what Google is offering.
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