Tau VMs

Compute Engine virtual machines optimized for scale-out workloads.

Optimized for cost-effective performance

Tau VMs deliver up to 42% better price-performance over comparable general-purpose offerings.1 Part of Compute Engine, Tau VMs offer a leading combination of performance, price, and architecture choice, offering customers the lowest cost solution for scale-out workloads.

What's new

scale-out diagram

Designed for scale-out workloads

Tau VMs offer a great combination of performance and price for your scale-out workloads including web servers, containerized microservices, media transcoding, and large-scale Java applications.

clipboard with pen and cup

Architecture choice

Choose from x86 or Arm-based VMs to meet your workload and business requirements. Tau VMs provide excellent price-performance to test, develop, and run your workloads on the optimal architecture for your workload.

graphs

More savings

Tau VMs are the lowest cost solution for scale-out workloads on Compute Engine, with up to 42% higher price-performance compared to general-purpose VMs of any of the leading public cloud vendors.

Containers

Get more from your containers

Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) supports Tau VMs, helping you optimize price-performance for your containerized workloads. Run Tau VMs in GKE Autopilot mode for a hands-off experience, or on GKE Standard clusters, where you manage your own nodepools. 

Customers and partners

IDC logo

“The new Tau VM family is an important expansion to Google Cloud’s already comprehensive Compute Engine portfolio designed to drive cost efficiency for large-scale, cloud workloads. Tau VMs deliver on both fronts—an attractive combination of performance and price compared to other leading cloud providers. The initial testing results for Tau VMs demonstrate the ongoing commitment Google has to innovating in scale-out platforms.” - Matt Eastwood, Senior Vice President, Enterprise Infrastructure, Cloud, Developers, and Alliances, IDC

blank

“At OpenX, our ad-exchange services over 200 billion requests every day. Getting the best combination of performance and price from the infrastructure is critically important for us. We use multiple Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) clusters across geographic regions with autoscaling to power our ad-delivery components. Running Google Cloud’s Tau VMs with GKE has enabled over 40% better price-performance and 62% latency reduction for our application as compared to the prior generation family. We have made the move to Tau VMs for our application to take advantage of these benefits.” - Paul T. Ryan, CTO, OpenX

Snap logo

“At Snap, it is critical for our business to continue improving our scale-out compute infrastructure for key Snapchat capabilities like AR, Lenses, Spotlight and Maps. We were impressed when we tested Google Cloud’s new Tau VMs with Google Kubernetes Engine. While it's early days, we believe we can gain double digits in infrastructure performance improvements for key workloads—enabling us to do more with less and invest even more in new features for our amazing Snapchat community." - Cody Powell, Senior Engineering Manager, Snap Inc.

Nylas logo

"For our core application, Google's Tau VMs with Google Kubernetes Engine delivers over 40% better price-performance than Amazon's Graviton-based VMs.  Further, Tau VMs maintain x86 compatibility and eliminate the need to maintain a separate stack for Arm. We are moving our workload from Amazon Web Services to Google Cloud to take advantage of these benefits."  - David Ting, SVP of Engineering, Nylas

ascend.io logo

“Our core capability at Ascend is bringing together data ingestion, transformation, delivery, orchestration and observability into a single platform.  To operate at scale and keep pace with our telemetry data production rates, high single-threaded performance is critical.  With Google Cloud’s Tau VMs with Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), we are able to achieve over 125% higher performance than previous generation families. This has completely changed our ability to query historical metrics. Where previously metric queries against historical data over ranges longer than a couple hours were difficult, we can now easily query data ranges of multiple weeks.” - Joe Stevens, Tech Lead - Infrastructure, Ascend.io 

  
Momento logo

“Momento’s serverless cache enables developers to accelerate database and application performance at scale. Over the past few months, we have become intimately familiar with Google Cloud’s new T2A VMs. We were pleasantly surprised with the ease of portability to Arm instance from day one. The maturity of the T2A platform gives us the confidence to start using these VMs in production. Innovations like T2A VMs in Google Cloud help us continuously innovate on behalf of our customers.” - Khawaja Shams, CEO, Momento

Industry leading price-performance

View the benchmarking reproduction instructions for the charts here.
Relative price-performance chart
1. Results are based on estimated SPECrate®2017_int_base run on production VMs of two other leading cloud vendors and pre-production Google Cloud Tau VMs using vendor recommended compilers. SPECrate is a trademark of the Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation. More information available at www.spec.org.
Price-perf chart
 Results are based on using GCC compiler with all VMs.

Choosing the right virtual machine

Compute Engine offers multiple machine families to choose from, each suited for specific workloads and applications. The table provides machine type recommendations for different workloads. 
Choosing the right virtual machine

"At Snap, it is critical for our business to continue improving our scale-out compute infrastructure for key Snapchat capabilities like AR, Lenses, Spotlight and Maps. We were impressed when we tested Google Cloud’s new Tau VMs with Google Kubernetes Engine. While it's early days, we believe we can gain double digits in infrastructure performance improvements for key workloads—enabling us to do more with less and invest even more in new features for our amazing Snap community."

Cody Powell, Senior Engineering Manager, Snap

Pricing

Tau VMs are priced to support significant total cost and price-performance improvements for your cloud applications. Check out our pricing pages for more details.

Take the next step

Start building on Google Cloud with $300 in free credits and 20+ always free products.

Need help getting started?
Work with a trusted partner
Continue browsing

Take the next step

Start your next project, explore interactive tutorials, and manage your account.

Need help getting started?
Work with a trusted partner
Get tips & best practices