In a recent blog post, Google announced its new E2 family of general-purpose VMs for Google Compute Engine are available in beta. With E2, Google aims to provide customers with flexible, performance-driven, and cost-effective VMs for Google Compute Engine on its Google Cloud Platform (GCP).
Earlier in 2019, Google announced the general-purpose (N2) and compute-optimized (C2) instance families. E2 complements these and other VM families. Each VM family on GCP is suitable for different workload scenarios depending on the need for compute and memory. Initially, Google will offer E2 machine types, based on industry-standard x86 chips from Intel and AMD, as custom VM "shapes" (vCPU/memory) or with predefined configurations. Shared-core instances are also available for smaller workloads. Furthermore, customers can launch E2 VMs on-demand or as preemptible VMs.
Google’s E2 VMs make better use of hardware resources through the so-called dynamic resource management. Behind the scenes, the hypervisor dynamically maps E2 virtual CPU and memory to physical CPU and memory on demand, hence, providing better utilization of physical resources, and driving down costs for the customer.
With the E2 VMs, Google provides customers configurations with performance similar to the N1. According to the blog post by June Yang, director, product management at Google, they also:
Lower TCO: 31% savings compared to N1, offering the lowest total cost of ownership of any VM in Google Cloud.
Consistent performance: VMs get reliable and sustained performance at a consistently low price point. Unlike comparable options from other cloud providers, E2 VMs can sustain high CPU load without artificial throttling or complicated pricing.
Flexibility: You can tailor your E2 instance with up to 16 vCPUs and 128 GB of memory.
Source: https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/compute/google-compute-engine-gets-new-e2-vm-machine-types
Moreover, Urs Hölzle, senior vice president of technical infrastructure at Google, supports the statements in a tweet:
This will be very popular: if your workload can tolerate a *slightly* worse latency SLA, you can get the same VM up to 31% cheaper. E2s should work for the majority of IT workloads.
E2 VMs are now available in the regions Iowa, South Carolina, Oregon, Northern Virginia, Belgium, Netherlands, Taiwan and Singapore; with more regions to come. Furthermore, pricing details are available on the pricing page.
