Google doesn’t put out product press releases. It’s too cool for that. But it did post a blog yesterday about some new Google Cloud Platform (GCP) features that it wants people to know about.
One new feature is a technique for customers to rightsize their virtual machines (VMs). Its VM Rightsizing Recommendation technology monitors CPU and RAM usage over time and visually shows whether VMs are the right size for the work they perform. The user can accept the recommendation and resize the VM with a single click.
Google also created Cloud Shell — a free VM for GCP customers integrated into the web console — for users to manage their resources. It comes with many common tools pre-installed, including Google Cloud SDK, Git, Mercurial, Docker, Gradle, Make, and Maven. With the free VM, the pre-installed tools, and support for several programming languages, customers can also build and test their resources.
Here are some other new features in GCP:
- Google supplies VMs in a variety of sizes, but when there’s not a perfect fit, users can now create a custom machine type, specifying the number of cores and memory desired.
- Google is offering Preemptible VMs to save money on batch jobs and fault-tolerant workloads. Preemptible VMs fill the spare capacity in Google’s data centers. And for certain jobs customers can use these VMs at cheaper prices. This also helps Google optimize its data center utilization.
- The cloud provider also added automated storage increases to Cloud SQL. When this Cloud SQL feature is enabled, the available database storage is checked every 30 seconds, and more is added as needed in 5GB to 25GB increments, depending on the size of the database. Instead of having to provision storage to accommodate future database growth, the storage grows as the database grows.
