Compute Engine

Virtual machines for every workload.

Scalable and secure compute instances running on our global infrastructure. From a single dev box to thousands of production nodes — provision in seconds, pay by the second.

US-CENTRAL1 (VPC)Load BalancerMANAGED INSTANCE GROUPVM-Instance-1CPU64%MEM32GB500GB SSDVM-Instance-2CPU64%MEM32GB500GB SSDVM-Instance-3CPU64%MEM32GB500GB SSDLive MigrationAuto-scaling

Zero downtime

Live migration

Auto discounts

Sustained use

Hardware security

Shielded VMs

Exact fit pricing

Custom shapes

Machine families

Purpose-built configurations for every workload profile — from web serving to GPU-accelerated ML training.

E2 / N2 / N2D

General Purpose

Best price-performance ratio for a wide variety of workloads. Web serving, app backends, small-to-medium databases, dev environments.

Web serversMicroservicesSmall databasesDevelopment
View all configurations

vCPUs

1 – 128

Memory

Up to 512 GB

Network

Up to 32 Gbps

Local SSD

Up to 3 TB

Built for production.

Enterprise-grade capabilities that come standard with every instance.

Live migration

VMs move seamlessly between hosts during infrastructure maintenance — zero downtime, zero intervention, zero impact.

Shielded VMs

Hardware-rooted security with vTPM, Secure Boot, and integrity monitoring. Verifiable instance identity by default.

Custom machine types

Configure exact vCPU and memory ratios for your workload. No predefined tiers — pay precisely for what you need.

Spot & preemptible VMs

The same infrastructure at up to 91% discount. Ideal for fault-tolerant batch processing and stateless workloads.

Persistent Disks

Durable, high-performance block storage. Independent of VM lifecycle — snapshot, resize, and attach across instances.

Nested virtualization

Run hypervisors inside VMs. Test VMware migrations, run CI/CD environments, or develop cloud-native tooling locally.

Getting started

Launch your first instance in three steps. CLI, console, or API — your choice.

Terminal
ur compute instances create my-vm \
  --machine-type=e2-standard-4 \
  --image-family=ubuntu-2404-lts \
  --boot-disk-size=50GB \
  --zone=eu-west1-b

Built for your workload.

From web serving to distributed ML training — see how teams use Virtual Machines.

Auto-scaling web infrastructure

Deploy managed instance groups behind a global HTTPS load balancer. Auto-scale from 2 to 2,000 instances based on real-time traffic. Health checks automatically replace unhealthy instances.

View tutorial

Suggested configuration

E2-standard-4 · Managed Instance Group · Global LB

Estimate your costs

Create detailed configurations to see exactly how much your architecture will cost. Pay for what you use, down to the second.

Configuration 1

Estimated: $0.00/mo

Compute options

280
GB
2 GB32 GB
Preemptible VM

Networking

Public IP address
GB

Storage

GB
5 GB4096 GB
Config 1 cost$0.00

Cost details

$NaN

Prices in USD exclude VAT.

Configuration 1
$NaN
Virtual machine Compute Cloud 1$NaN

Works seamlessly with

Kubernetes Engine
Cloud SQL
VPC Networks
Cloud Monitoring
IAM
Artifact Registry
Cloud Build
Cloud Logging

Frequently asked questions

Ready to get started?

Create your first VM in under 60 seconds. New accounts receive introductory credits.