Google Cloud Compute is a primitive way to deploy and manage pre cloud era not ready yet for managed and ephemeral environments. Google Cloud Compute lets us to run Linux and Windows workloads by our own management in terms of performance, availability and security.

Where everything started

Days ago, several days ago, we used to use Data Centers to place our own servers, switches, routers, and storages. In these days before Cloud era, you have everything racked on our facility, could be local in your office or rented in a Data Center where you can rent a rack or half-rack for your case.

Now, in this Cloud era we have companies like Google which provide all these primitive services in their own facilities around the world. We just must put our credit card in and select a facility, or region as most Cloud providers call it, to deploy our Applications, Databases and more.

Thus, most Cloud providers still offer these primitive services in an era where we can just avoid using it. We are going to cover more of this in detail in future articles but for some companies these primitive services are needed to run old applications that are complex or nearly impossible to migrate.

What kind of service do we have?

We have multiple services to run from a simple virtual machine or instance, to schedule a job or to migrate VMware machines to Google.

• Google Compute Engine is a computing and hosting service that lets you create and run virtual machines on Google infrastructure. Compute Engine offers scale, performance, and value that lets you easily launch large compute clusters on Google's infrastructure. There are no upfront investments, and you can run thousands of virtual CPUs on a system that offers quick, consistent performance.
• Google Batch is a fully managed service that lets you schedule, queue, and execute batch processing workloads on Google Cloud resources. Batch provisions resources and manages capacity on your behalf, allowing your batch workloads to run at scale.
• Google Cloud VMware Engine is a fully managed service that lets you run the VMware platform in Google Cloud. Google manages the infrastructure, networking, and management services so that you can use the VMware platform efficiently and securely.

Google Compute Engine compounds several internals services that provide networking, storage, security, images, and complex services like scale. Within Compute Engine you can run Linux or Windows server using the many images’ options available to install. Google provides us with a long and updated list of Operative Systems pre-installed, no need to mount an ISO image, so we only need to complete the installation and configure our own settings.

Once our Virtual Machine is running, we can login using SSH or RDP and install our Apps, Databases and more like any Virtual Machine or Bare Metal Server. Using a Virtual Machine, we need to take care of regular updating our software, regular check for VM performance and availability such us CPU, RAM and SSD. Finally, security depends on us, so we need to configure our own firewall allowing or disabling for externals connections.

In other hands, we have Google Batch which simplify a lot all the above process if we just need to run a script or a Docker Container. I strongly recommend these last options when we just need to run simple workloads at scheduled hours and let Google manage the Virtual Machines.

Google Bach does not allow us to manage inbound connections or store high amounts of data on disk because is an ephemeral job so it will run, process our workload, and stop. Everything locally generated will be lost and the new job will start from a fresh environment.