GCP Compute 101

## Compute Engine - Offers managed virtual machines - No upfront investment - Fast and consitent performance - Create VMs with GCP Console or **gcloud** - Run images of Linux or Windows Server - Pick memory & CPU: use predefined types, or make a custom VM - Pick GPUs if you need them - Pick persistent disks: standard or SSD - Pick local SSD for scratch space too if you need it - Pick a boot image: Linux or Windows Server - Define a startup script if you like - Take disk snapshots as backups or as migration tools - Offers innovative pricing - Per-second billing, sustained use discounts - Preemptible instances - High throughput to storage at no exta cost - Custom machine types: Only pay for the hardware you need - Scales up or scale outs - Use big VMs for memory- and compute-intensive applications - Use Autoscaling for resilient, scalable applications ## App Engine - a PaaS for building scalable applications - makes deployment, maintenance, and scalability easy so you can focus on innovation - esp suited for building scalable web applications and mobile backends - standard environment: - easily deploy your applications - autoscale workloads - free daily quota - usage based pricing - SDKs for development, testing and deployment - sandbox constraints: - no writing to local files - all requests time out at 60s - limits on third-party software - flexible environment: - build and deploy containerized applications with a click - no sandbox constraints - can access App Engine resources - Comparing the App Engine environments