After running the service in preview mode for over a year,Google is making its IaaS (infrastructure-as-a-service) Google Compute Engine (GCE) available as a full-fledged commercial service.
The company has established a service level agreement (SLA) where it guarantees GCE to be available 99.95% of the time. It has also cut prices and increased the number of options the service offers.
GCE "is a long-term strategic bet for the company," said Brian Goldfarb, Google's head of cloud platform marketing, adding that "we have an incredibly high bar for what general availability means."
Although the company has offered the Google App Engine PaaS (platform-as-a-service) since 2008, Google has been fairly late to the IaaS space. Introduced as a preview in June 2012, GCE competes with Amazon's popular Elastic Cloud Compute (EC2) service. A number of companies already use GCE, including Snapchat, Evite and Red Hat.
