Google Compute Engine launches Custom Machine Types to provide tailored VM sizes

Google today announced the introduction of Custom Machine Types, a new option people can use to get access to just the right size of virtual machine in the Google Compute Engine public cloud.

This becomes useful, for example, when you grow out of a virtual machine, which is a virtual slice of a single physical server.

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“Once you ’round up,’ you’ll end up paying up to twice as much for just one more vCPU! Custom machine types solve this problem, letting you fit the VM to your workload, saving you money,” Google product manager Sami Iqram wrote in a blog post on the news.

Generally speaking, this feature gives Google Compute Engine more flexibility than the other major cloud infrastructure providers, Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure. This across-the-board feature of the Google cloud is reminiscent of the per-minute billing announced in 2013. That still distinguishes Google in the public cloud business, where the war is waged with price cuts, geographical expansion, and feature releases.

Not that Google is the first cloud provider to let users customize VM sizes. CloudSigma has done that for years.

In the next few days Google Compute Engine users will see the Customize option when they spin up new instances in the Google Developer Console. From there, you just slide the virtual cores and memory buttons along a line until you have just the size you want.

Custom Machine Types are available in beta for the Debian, CentOS, CoreOS, OpenSUSE, and Ubuntu operating systems. Windows support is not yet available.