Tau VMs

Compute Engine virtual machines optimized for scale-out workloads.

42% better price-performance

Tau VMs deliver 42% better price-performance over comparable general-purpose offerings.¹ Part of Compute Engine, Tau VMs offer a leading combination of performance, price, and full x86 compatibility, offering customers the lowest cost solution for scale-out workloads.

What's new

Blog post

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Blog post

New Tau VMs deliver leading price-performance for scale-out workloads

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Designed for scale-out workloads

T2D VMs, the first instance type in the Tau VM family, are built on the latest 3rd Gen AMD EPYC^TM processors. T2D 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. T2D VMs will come in predefined VM shapes, with up to 60 vCPUs per VM, and 4 GB of memory per vCPU, and offer up to 32 Gbps networking.

Full x86 compatibility

The x86 compatibility provided by T2D VMs gives you market-leading performance improvements and cost savings, without having to port your applications to a new processor architecture.

More savings

T2D will be the lowest cost solution for scale-out workloads, with 42% higher price-performance compared to general-purpose VMs of any of the leading public cloud vendors.

Get more from your containers

Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) supports Tau VMs, helping you optimize price-performance for your containerized workloads. You can add T2D nodes to your GKE clusters by specifying the T2D machine type in your GKE node pools.

Customers and partners

"DoIT partners with leading cloud vendors who are focused on growth and cost optimization. In our preliminary testing of Google’s new Tau VMs with the Coremark benchmark, we were thrilled to see the incredible performance at 50% better than a comparable ARM-based offering from another leading public cloud. With Tau VMs, Google Cloud has set a new bar for price-performance, making the cloud even more accessible to digital native companies. We are excited to bring Google’s Tau VMs to our joint customers." - Yoav Toussia-Cohen, CEO, DoIT International

“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

“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.

"High performance at the right price point is a critical consideration as we work to serve the global public conversation. We are excited by initial tests that show potential for double digit performance improvement. We are collaborating with Google Cloud to more deeply evaluate benefits on price and performance for specific compute workloads that we can realize through use of the new Tau VM family.” - Nick Tornow, Platform Lead, Twitter

"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

“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

Industry leading price-performance

View the benchmarking reproduction instructions for the charts here.

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.

"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

Tau VMs are priced to support significant TCO and price-performance improvements for your cloud applications. A 32 vCPU VM with 128 GB RAM will be priced at $1.3520 per hour for on-demand usage in us-central1.