Google Compute Engine FAQ

About Compute Engine

This section answers general questions about Compute Engine.

What is Compute Engine? What can it do?

Compute Engine is an Infrastructure-as-a-Service product offering flexible, self-managed virtual machines (VMs) hosted on Google's infrastructure. Compute Engine includes Linux- and Windows-based VMs running on KVM, local and durable storage options, and a REST-based API for configuration and control. The service integrates with Google Cloud technologies such as Cloud Storage, App Engine, and BigQuery to extend beyond the basic computational capability to create more complex and sophisticated apps.

What is a virtual CPU in Compute Engine?

On Compute Engine, each virtual CPU (vCPU) is implemented as a single hardware hyper-thread on one of the available CPU Platforms. On Intel Xeon processors, Intel Hyper-Threading Technology allows multiple application threads to run on each physical processor core. You configure your Compute Engine VMs with one or more of these hyper-threads as vCPUs. The machine type specifies the number of vCPUs that your instance has.

You can identify the specific CPU platform for your instance using one of the following options:

See what CPU platforms are available in each of the available regions and zones.
Use the compute.instances.get method to obtain the cpuPlatform property for one of your existing instances.
On Linux instances, run cat /proc/cpuinfo.

If you want to change the CPU platform for your instance, you can specify a minimum CPU platform.

How do App Engine and Compute Engine relate to each other?

We see the two as being complementary. App Engine is Google's Platform-as-a-Service offering and Compute Engine is Google's Infrastructure-as-a-Service offering. App Engine is great for running web-based apps, line of business apps, and mobile backends. Compute Engine is great for when you need more control of the underlying infrastructure. For example, you might use Compute Engine when you have highly customized business logic or you want to run your own storage system.

How do I get started?

Try the Getting Started guides for the service. After you have finished the quickstart, read the Virtual machine instances overview to start learning about Compute Engine.

You might be eligible for a free trial. For information about how the free trial works, including information about quotas, see the Free cloud features and trial offer.

Billing

This section answers questions about Compute Engine billing.

How does pricing and purchasing work?

Compute Engine charges based on compute instance, storage, and network use. VMs are charged on a per-second basis with a 1 minute minimum. Storage cost is calculated based on the amount of data you store. Network cost is calculated based on the amount of data transferred between VMs that communicate with each other and with the Internet. For more information, review our price sheet.

Do your prices include tax?

No, the price sheet does not include tax.

Support and feedback

This section answers questions about Compute Engine support and feedback.

Do you offer paid support?

Yes, we offer paid support for enterprise customers. For more information, contact our sales organization.

Do you offer a Service Level Agreement (SLA)?

Yes, we offer a Compute Engine SLA.

Where can I send feedback?

For billing-related questions, you can send questions to the appropriate support channel.

For feature requests and bug reports, submit an issue to our issues tracker.

Authentication

This section answers questions about authentication and authorization.

How can I authenticate to the Compute Engine API?

How you authenticate to the Compute Engine API depends on the method used to access the API: client libraries, Google Cloud CLI, or REST. For more information, see Authenticate to Compute Engine.

To authenticate apps or workloads to Google Cloud APIs, see Choose a workload authentication method.

What are service accounts?

A service account is an account that represents an application, as opposed to representing an end user. These accounts can be used to authorize Compute Engine to act on the behalf of the user to access non-sensitive information. A service account is never used to access user information. Service accounts simplify the process of authenticating from Compute Engine to other services by handling the authorization process for the user.

Compute Engine developers typically use Compute Engine service accounts in their applications. For more information about service accounts, see Service accounts.

How do I create a service account?

Compute Engine creates a service account automatically when you create a new instance and specify a service account scope for that instance.

Projects

This section answers questions about projects in Compute Engine.

What are projects?

A project is a container for all Compute Engine resources. Each project is a totally compartmentalized world; projects don't share resources, can have different owners and users, are billed separately, and are no more accessible to each other than your home computer is accessible to your neighbor's computer.

How can I create a project?

Sign in to your Google Account. If you don't already have one, Sign up for a new account.
Go to the Google Cloud console. When prompted, select an existing project or create a new project.
Important: The name you use must be between 4 and 30 characters. When you type the name, the form will suggest a project ID, which you can edit. The project ID you use must be between 6 and 30 characters, with a lowercase letter as the first character. You can use a dash, lowercase letter, or digit for the remaining characters, but the last character cannot be a dash. You should be aware that some resource identifiers (such as project IDs) might be retained beyond the life of your project. For this reason, avoid storing sensitive information in resource identifiers.
...see naming guidelines
Follow the prompts to set up billing. If you are new to Google Cloud, then you have 90 days, $300 free trial credit to pay for your instances.

What is the difference between a project number and a project ID?

Every project can be identified in two ways: the project number or the project ID. The project number is automatically created when you create the project, whereas the project ID is created by you, or whoever created the project. The project ID is optional for many services, but is required by Compute Engine. For more information, see Google Cloud console Projects.

Where can I find my project ID?

You can find your project ID on the Google Cloud console, which provides a list of your projects and their project IDs upon entry.

Where can I request more quota for my project?

By default, all Compute Engine projects have default quotas for various resource types. However, these default quotas can be increased on a per-project basis. Check your quota limits and usage in the quota page on the Google Cloud console. If you reach the limit for your resources and need more quota, make a request to increase the quota for certain resources using the IAM quotas page. You can make a request by clicking the Edit Quotas button on the top of the page.

Instances

This section answers questions about compute instances.

What kind of machine configuration (memory, RAM, CPU) can I choose for my instance?

Compute Engine offers several configurations for your instance. You can also create custom configurations that match your exact instance needs. See the full list of available options on the Machine Types page.

If I accidentally delete my instance, can I retrieve it?

No, instances that have been deleted cannot be retrieved. However, if an instance is only

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