Google has lowered prices for some of its cloud computing service for businesses and added features as it steps up competition with Amazon.com and Microsoft.
Among the additions is support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux and other Linux offerings.
“During Preview, Compute Engine supported two of the most popular Linux distributions, Debian and Centos, customized with a Google-built kernel,” Google says.
“This gave developers a familiar environment to build on, but some software that required specific kernels or loadable modules (e.g. some file systems) were not supported. Now you can run any out-of-the-box Linux distribution (including SELinux and CoreOS) as well as any kernel or software you like, including Docker, FOG, xfs and aufs. We’re also announcing support for SUSE and Red Hat Enterprise Linux (in Limited Preview) and FreeBSD.”
Red Hat is a growing player in the cloud computing business and recently ungraded RHEL, which is its flagship product, as well as its own Platform as a Service offering.
In the past few months, customers like Snapchat, Cooladata, Mendelics, Evite and Wix have built complex systems on Compute Engine and partners like SaltStack, Wowza, Rightscale, “Qubole, Red Hat, SUSE, and Scalr have joined our Cloud Platform Partner Program, with new integrations with Compute Engine,” Google noted.
The service, which lets customers purchase access to its computing power, is cutting prices for some of the most popular options by 10 percent, Google said in a blog posting. It is also adding broader support for customers during maintenance.
“Google Cloud Platform gives developers the flexibility to architect applications with both managed and unmanaged services that run on Google’s infrastructure. We’ve been working to improve the developer experience across our services to meet the standards our own engineers would expect here at Google,” the blog says.
“Today, Google Compute Engine is Generally Available (GA), offering virtual machines that are performant, scalable, reliable, and offer industry-leading security features like encryption of data at rest. Compute Engine is available with 24/7 support and a 99.95% monthly SLA for your mission-critical workloads. We are also introducing several new features and lower prices for persistent disks and popular compute instances.”
The changes to Google Compute Engine service are aimed at attracting corporate customers away from Amazon, Microsoft and others that are betting businesses will access computing power from large, centralized data centers instead of their own systems.
Google, owner of the world’s most popular search engine, is boosting investments in new services and formats as it expands beyond advertisements alongside search results on desktop computers.
Red Hat is based in Raleigh.
More information about the Google service is available online.
