Here's Why CIOs should Consider Google Compute Engine for a Multi-Cloud Strategy

A multi-cloud approach to business infrastructure can be one of the simplest ways for organizations to leverage the strengths of various cloud providers while minimizing weaknesses. Not only can today's businesses spread critical workloads effectively across a range of cloud environments, but they can also access new solutions for security, cost-savings, and productivity by making use of the right cloud services.

For instance, a multi-cloud would allow customers using an existing application on AWS to use Google's powerful collection of APIs for Cloud Video Intelligence, Vision, or Data Loss Prevention. The only problem that some businesses have with setting up a multi-cloud solution, is that they're not sure how to manage the complexities of moving into such a scenario.

There's a good chance that the Google Compute Engine could provide assistance when it comes to building your multi-cloud strategy.

What is Google Compute Engine?

Google's new and impressive "Compute Engine", is a form of IaaS, or infrastructure-as-a-service offering. It takes most of the work out of finding and establishing a virtual machine, or VM. With Compute Engine, CIOs can access almost unlimited power from VMs within the cloud.

When you consider the fact that about 70% or more of an IT sector's budget is spent entirely on building, planning, and maintaining infrastructure, you can see how simplicity in moving to the multi-cloud is essential. Less than 30% of costs are actually attributed to innovating, accessing new productivity solutions, and gaining an all-important competitive advantage.

With the Google Compute Engine IaaS, you can make your company more competitive by minimizing costs, developing products that are beneficial for your company, and improving your time to market.

Why Google, and Not the Competitors?

So, what makes Google's Compute Engine so much more effective than its competitors? Well, as an industry-leading platform, Google has a lot to offer, including fifteen years of experience in managing and developing the most advanced data centers and networks in the world, using things like Gmail, Google Search, and YouTube.

Google is responsible for designing most of the technology that made the public cloud a potential solution for businesses in the first place, such as containers, Kubernetes, and Borg. It can integrate with other products in the Google Cloud suite, including big-data solutions like BigQuery, and VMs can start in less than a minute, which makes Google consistently faster than other cloud providers.

CIOs can alter the underlying software and hardware of their Google systems without having to move their VMs offline with live migration, and they're not forced to buy SSD storage and VMs together. Additionally, a lot of CIOs appreciate the flexibility of Google's per-minute billing with the Compute Engine.

Businesses don't need to pay for anything more than they need, and pre-emptible VMs can give companies access to complete peace of mind when running their infrastructure.

For those who aren't sure, pre-emptible VMs from Google are up to 80% cheaper than their standard counterparts, easy to use with a single switch, and effective. Since many Google customers run large clusters of 10k+ cores, they can use pre-emptible VMs to minimize costs. These solutions are ideal for batch-processing things like media transcoding, image understanding, rendering, financial analysis, and more.

Google Compute Engine can shut down a VM within 30 seconds of notice, but there is a maximum uptime of 24 hours.

Which Customers Need Google Compute Engine?

So, who needs the multi-cloud solution through Google Compute Engine? Ultimately, any business that does a lot of computing could benefit from the service - this is particularly true of companies with an IT infrastructure that relies on data centers, VMs, and servers.

For instance, in the case of infrastructure replacement, Spotify currently uses data pipeline processing and a service backend that's hosted entirely on Compute Engine. Additionally, Wix stores, serves, manages, and uploads video, audio, and images through Compute Engine.

From a perspective of business solutions, Compute Engine can be used for transcoding, genomics, media rendering and more. For instance, the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard use it for Genomics research, while "Atomic Fiction" use Compute Engine for video rendering.

While there are other competitors in the marketplace, like Amazon Web Services, and Microsoft Azure, they simply don't offer the level of Functionality, Cost, and Reliability that Google and the Compute Engine can offer.

For instance:

• Functionality: Google is leading innovation with their open-source software in the cloud, including TensorFlow and Kubernetes. AWS has an older, more outdated technology stack, and Microsoft offers limited versatility to their customers.
• Cost: Google provides sustained-use discounts and pre-emptible VMs to reduce costs, whereas AWS has complicated models for pricing. At the same time, running a Windows server through the Compute Engine is much cheaper than it is on Azure.
• Reliability: While AWS requires reboots after security breaches or maintenance for VMs, Google ensures no planned outages thanks to live migration. Similarly, Azure customers report long VM startup times, alongside unreliability. Google VMs start fast, perform well, and have an uptime of around 99.95%.

Choosing Google for Multi-Cloud Just Makes Sense

When it comes to making the most out of the multi-cloud, and the benefits of cloud computing, choosing Google Compute Engine simply makes sense. Other companies force their users to pay up front for years of computing capacity, while Google offers flexibility that's perfect for taking advantage of the multi-cloud space.

Even if we just consider the per-minute billing that Google offers, we see that the industry leader can offer greater versatility to CIOs. On top of that, the introduction of the Google "Automatic Sustained-Use" discount solution from 2014 helps to ensure that cloud spend is kept as low as possible. It offers discounts to users of Google Compute Engine, who operate for a "significant portion" of billing months.

As the multi-cloud becomes more appealing for those in search of better productivity, improved redundancy, and better peace of mind in the competitive marketplace, the Google Compute Engine seems like a good place to begin innovation. Whether you're looking to scale up your IT environments, reduce costs by moving to the cloud, or distribute systems into various regions, you can get a great deal on the Google platform.