June Monthly Google Compute Engine Release Announcement

[Google Compute Engine Team]

Greetings again Google Cloud Platform users,

The team wants to welcome all of the new Compute Engine users that have signed up since our open announcement at Google I/O. We are thrilled to see so many new users and look forward to the experiences you'll be sharing online.

The first change this month is to f1-micro instances. These instances use a shared CPU resource that is optimal for quick, short lived tasks such as receiving and storing data. As such, these instances spend much of their time idle, but when they are working, they consume all of their resources. We have now enabled these instances to be able to burst, for a short period of time, above their normal CPU resource allocation when extra capacity is available. If you have evaluated these instance types in the past, you may want to take another look.

This month we've also added the ability to execute a software (ACPI) reset on your compute instances via the API. Below is quick sample of using gcutil to perform this type of reset. It is important to note that scratch disk data is preserved through the reboot, but that it still remains a transient resource that is tied to the life of the virtual machine. If you're using a compiled language (like Java) you will need to pick up an additive update to the v1beta15 API by downloading the latest version of the client library.

testuser@desktop:~/$ gcutil --project=google.com:testproject --format=json resetinstance --zone=us-central1-b test1

<A copy of the command and example output can be found at https://gist.github.com/PaulRashidi/cda9acb5e673c0f1d34e>

Finally, new Debian images were released last week. The details regarding the images can be found at the release notes page.

That's it for this month, but stay tuned; we have more great features coming soon!

Thanks, and happy computing!

-- Paul Rashidi, on behalf of the Google Cloud Platform