Compute Engine Now Ready for Prime Time

For a company with as much expertise in running massive data centers packed with computing power, It's got to sting that Amazon Web Service gets all the glory when customers need cloud-computing infrastructure. Which is doubtless why Google is happy that its Google Compute Engine is out of testing and now generally available to all comers. The service offers a pool of servers on which customers can run various versions of Linux, paying for usage and assured that the systems will be up and running at least 99.95 percent of the time.

Ari Balogh, a Google vice president, announced Google Compute Engine's general availability on Monday night and said the company cut prices 10 percent for ordinary server instances, cut them 60 percent for storage fees, and dropped them altogether for storage input-output costs. He also said Google fired up a new 16-core server option for heavier-duty jobs.