Cloud Bytes — selected guide
Compute Engine in a minute
Twelve one-minute orientations across compute, data, operations, networking, and security
Twelve short primers introduce the roles of Google Cloud compute, storage, databases, messaging, analytics, observability, networking, and access controls. These 2020–2022 overviews help orient service choices rather than provide deployment recipes.
Google Cloud Tech 1 of 12
In this collection Browse 12 summaries 1 of 12
Priyanka Vergadia introduces Compute Engine as virtual machines (VMs) running in Google's data centers. The 2020 primer focuses on choosing a machine to fit an existing application's resource needs and keeping it running during host maintenance 00:00–01:43(opens in a new tab).
Key Points Covered
- Match resources to the workload: The examples pair general-purpose machines with web servers, memory-optimized machines with in-memory databases, and GPUs with intensive computation such as machine learning 00:00–00:48(opens in a new tab).
- Move between hosts without rebooting: Live migration is presented as keeping applications running during maintenance. Separately, right-sizing recommendations suggest changing the machine type to better fit measured usage 00:48–01:43(opens in a new tab).
- Lower-cost options have different conditions: The 2020 overview includes discounts tied to usage or commitments and describes Preemptible VMs as short-term instances for batch jobs and fault-tolerant workloads. These are historical product and pricing terms, not a current quote 00:48–01:43(opens in a new tab).
Full video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IuK4gQeHRcI(opens in a new tab)