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Custom machine types

Create Compute Engine VMs with optimal amounts of vCPU and memory.

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Custom Machine Types Overview logo

Tailor your Compute Engine instances

Custom machine types is a feature of Compute Engine that lets you easily create a machine type customized to your needs. With custom machine types, you can create virtual machines with the optimal amount of CPU and memory for your workloads. Create a machine type with as little as 1 vCPU and up to 96 vCPUs, or any even number of vCPUs in between. You can configure up to 8.0 GB of memory per vCPU.
Tailored, configurable infrastructure logo

Tailored, configurable infrastructure

By offering custom machine types and predefined machine types, Compute Engine allows you to tailor your infrastructure to your workload. And you aren’t locked in to your choice. Compute Engine’s stop/start feature allows you move your workload to a smaller or larger custom machine type instance, or to a predefined configuration.

Find your optimal pricing logo

Find your optimal pricing

Custom machine types are priced by the resources they use (i.e. vCPU, memory). You can predictably calculate the cost of custom machine type shapes in any configuration. Optimize your Compute Engine pricing by adding or subtracting resources above or below the next predefined machine type. For some use cases, you could save 50% or more compared to predefined types at other public cloud providers by configuring an optimal machine for your workload on Google Cloud.

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Enable it instantly

Create VMs with custom machine types using the Compute Engine UI, a simple gcloud command line invocation, or the API.

// CREATE INSTANCE WITH 4 vCPUs and 5 GB MEMORY
gcloud compute instances create my-vm --custom-cpu 4 --custom-memory 5 

Features

Programmatic access

Supported by the gcloud command line tool and through our API. It’s as easy as --custom-cpu {VCPUS} --custom-memory {MEMORY}.

Console configuration

In the create instance page, use the customize option and build a virtual machine to fit your needs.

OS support

CentOS, CoreOS, Debian, OpenSUSE, Red Hat, SLES, Ubuntu, and Windows. Or bring your own Linux variant.

Familiar capabilities

As a feature of Compute Engine, custom machine types offer all the same capabilities as predefined machine types. If you already use Compute Engine, you will find custom machine types very familiar.

Predictable pricing

Custom machine types are priced based on hourly usage per vCPUs and per GB of memory. A 8 vCPU 20 GB memory VM costs twice as much as a 4 vCPU 10 GB memory VM.

Automatic discounts

With sustained use discounts, we automatically give you discounted prices for long-running workloads with no sign-up fees or up-front commitment.

Commitment savings

With committed use discounts you can save up to 57% with no up-front costs or instance-type lock in.

Spot and Custom VMs

For batch jobs and other fault-tolerant workloads, you can customize and save more by making your custom machines Spot VMs.

Pricing

Custom machine types are billed per vCPUs memory provisioned to each instance.  In addition to the standard on-demand prices, Google also offers three ways to further reduce your monthly spend with Spot VMs, Sustained use discounts, and Committed use discounts.

Spot VM (and Preemptible VMs) 

Spot VMs are available at a 60-91% discount when compared to the price of standard VMs. These discounts combine with custom machine types to allow customers to save significant amounts on VMs for fault-tolerant workloads that can withstand possible ephemeral VMs that may be terminated with a 30 second warning. 

Sustained use discounts

Compute Engine calculates custom machine type sustained use discounts based on vCPU and memory usage, and applies the discounts described by the sustained usage discount table.

Committed use discounts

Customers may purchase a Committed use discount in return for a deeply discounted price for their custom machine type VM. This discount allows you to commit to specific amounts of vCPU, memory, GPU or local SSD that can then be used in custom machine types at whatever configuration is required for your workload. 

How much could you save with custom machine types?

Let’s say you are running a web server on a cloud provider that offers pre-defined virtual machines with 2 vCPUs and 7.5 GB of RAM and—for twice the cost—4 vCPUs and 15 GB of RAM. If your website would run best on VMs with 4 vCPUs and 8 GB of RAM, you could create custom machine types on Compute Engine and save 33% over your previous provider. You would also get the benefits of running your website on Google, such as automatic sustained use discounts or committed use discounts which can help you save even more.

US region pricing

Item US Region Hourly Price (billed per second) With sustained use discount at 100% usage When configured as a preemptible VM
vCPU $0.033174 / vCPU $0.023228 / vCPU $0.00698 / vCPU
Memory $0.004446 / GB $0.003112 / GB $0.00094 / GB

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