Tag Archives: Compute Engine

Compute Engine now with 3 TB of high-speed Local SSD and 64 TB of Persistent Disk per VM

To help your business grow, we are significantly increasing size limits of all Google Compute Engine block storage products, including Local SSD and both types of Persistent Disk.

Now up to 64TB of Persistent Disk may be attached per VM for most machine types, including both Standard and SSD-backed Persistent Disk. The volume size limit has increased to 64 TB also, eliminating the need to stripe disks for larger volumes.

Persistent Disk provides fantastic price-performance and offers excellent usability for workloads that rely on durable block storage. Persistent Disk SSD delivers 30 IOPS per 1 GB provisioned, up to 15,000 IOPS per instance. Persistent Disk Standard is great value at $0.04 per GB-mo and provides 0.75 read IOPS per GB and 1.5 write IOPS per GB. Performance limits are set at an instance level, and can be achieved with just a single Persistent Disk.

We have also increased the amount of Local SSD that can be attached to a single virtual machine to 3 TB. Available in Beta today, you can attach twice as many partitions of Local SSD to Google Compute Engine instances. Up to eight 375 GB partitions or 3 TB of high IOPS SSD can now be attached to any machine with at least one virtual CPU.

We talked with Aaron Raddon, Founder and CTO at Lytics who tested our larger Local SSDs. He found they improved Cassandra performance by 50% and provide provisioning flexibility that can lead to additional savings.
The new, larger SSD has the same incredible IOPS performance we announced in January, topping out at 680,000 random 4K read IOPS and 360,000 random 4K write IOPS. With Local SSD you can achieve multiple millions of operations per second for key-value stores and a million writes per second using as few as 50 servers on NoSQL databases.

Local SSD retains the competitive pricing of $0.218 per GB/month while continuing to support extraordinary IOPS performance. As always, data stored in Local SSD is encrypted and our live migration technology means no downtime during maintenance. Local SSD also retains the flexibility of attaching to any instance type.

Siddharth Choudhuri, Principal Engineer at Levyx stated that doubling capacity on local SSDs with the same high IOPS is a game changer for businesses seeking low-latency and high throughput on large datasets. It enables them to index billions of objects on a single, denser node in real-time on Google Cloud Platform when paired with Levyx’s Helium data store.

To get started, head over to the Compute Engine console or read about Persistent Disk and Local SSD in the product documentation.

- Posted by John Barrus, Senior Product Manager, Google Cloud Platform

Improved Compute Engine Quota experience

As part of our constant improvements to the Google Cloud Platform console we’ve recently updated our Google Compute Engine quotas page. Now you can easily see quota consumption levels and sort to find your most-used resources. This gives you a head start on determining and procuring any additional capacity you need so you hit fewer speed bumps on your road to growth and success.
We’ve also improved the process of requesting more quota, which can be initiated directly from the quotas page by clicking on the “Request increase” button. We’ve added additional checks to the request form that help speed up our response processing time; now most requests are completed in minutes. With these changes, we’re making it even easier to do more with Cloud Platform.

You can access your console at https://console.cloud.google.com and learn more about how GCP can help you build better applications faster on the https://cloud.google.com web page.

- Posted by Roy Peterkofsky, Product Manager

Containerizing in the real world . . . of Minecraft

Containers are all the rage right now. There are scores of best practices papers and tutorials out there, and "Intro to Containers" sessions at just about every conference even tangentially related to cloud computing. You may have read through the Docker docs, launched an NGINX Docker container, and read through Miles Ward’s Introduction to containers and Kubernetes piece. Still, containers can be a hard concept to internalize, especially if you have an existing application that you’re considering containerizing.

To help you through this conceptual hurdle, I’ve written a four-part series of blog posts that gives you a hands-on introduction to building, updating, and using containers for something familiar: running a Minecraft server. You can check them out here:


In the first part of the series, you’ll learn how to create a container image that includes everything a Minecraft server needs, use that image on Google Compute Engine to run the server, and make it accessible from your Minecraft client. You’ll use the Docker command-line tools to build, test, and run the container, as well as to push the image up into the Google Container Registry for use with a container-optimized instance.


Next, you'll work through the steps needed to separate out storage from the container and learn how to make regular backups of your game. If you’ve ever made a mistake in Minecraft, you know how critical being able to restore world state can be! As Minecraft is always more fun when it’s customized, you'll also learn how to update the container image with modifications you make to the server.properties file.

Finally, you’ll take the skills that you’ve learned and apply them to making something fun and slightly absurd: Minecraft Roulette. This application allows you to randomly connect to one of several different Minecraft worlds using a single IP as your entry point. As you work through this tutorial, you’ll learn the basics of Kubernetes, an open source container orchestrator.

By the end of the series, you’ll have grasped the basics of containers and Kubernetes, and will be set to go out and containerize your own application. Plus, you’ll have had the excuse to play a little Minecraft. Enjoy!

This blog post is not approved by or associated with Mojang or Minecraft.

- Posted by Julia Ferraioli, Senior Developer Advocate, Google Cloud Platform