Introducing E2, new cost-optimized general purpose VMs for Google Compute Engine

Editor’s note: As of March 19, 2020, E2 VMs are generally available. We’ve also added E2 VMs to all 22 global regions

General-purpose virtual machines are the workhorses of cloud applications. Today, we’re excited to announce our E2 family of VMs for Google Compute Engine featuring dynamic resource management to deliver reliable and sustained performance, flexible configurations, and the best total cost of ownership of any of our VMs.  

Now in beta, E2 VMs offer similar performance to comparable N1 configurations, providing:

• Lower TCO: 31% savings compared to N1, offering the lowest total cost of ownership of any VM in Google Cloud.

• Consistent performance: Your VMs get reliable and sustained performance at a consistent 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 32 vCPUs and 128 GB of memory. At the same time, you can provision only the resources that you need with 15 new predefined configurations or the ability to use custom machine types. 

Since E2 VMs are based on industry-standard x86 chips from Intel and AMD, you don’t need to change your code or recompile to take advantage of this price-performance. 

E2 VMs are a great fit for a broad range of workloads including web servers, business-critical applications, small-to-medium sized databases and development environments. If you have workloads that run well on N1, but don’t require large instance sizes, GPUs or local SSD, consider moving them to E2. For all but the most demanding workloads, we expect E2 to deliver similar performance to N1, at a significantly lower cost. 

Dynamic resource management

Using resource balancing technologies developed for Google’s own latency-critical services, E2 VMs make better use of hardware resources to drive costs down and pass the savings on to you. E2 VMs place an emphasis on performance and protect your workloads from the type of issues associated with resource-sharing thanks to our custom-built CPU scheduler and performance-aware live migration.

You can learn more about how dynamic resource management works by reading the technical blog on E2 VMs.

E2 machine types

At launch, we’re offering E2 machine types as custom VM shapes or predefined configurations:

We’re also introducing new shared-core instances, similar to our popular f1-micro and g1-small machine types. These are a great fit for smaller workloads like micro-services or development environments that don’t require the full vCPU.

E2 VMs can be launched on-demand or as preemptible VMs. They are also eligible for committed use discounts, bringing additional savings up to 55% for 3 year commitments. E2 VMs are powered by Intel Xeon and AMD EPYC processors, which are selected automatically based on availability. 

Get started

E2 VMs are rolling out this week to eight regions: Iowa, South Carolina, Oregon, Northern Virginia, Belgium, Netherlands, Taiwan and Singapore; with more regions in the works. To learn more about E2 VMs or other GCE VM options, check out our machine types page and our pricing page.