kicking off the rollout of our new Haswell servers with a new zone in Europe and upgrades in us-central1-b

[Google Compute Team]

Greetings Google Compute Engine users,

We wanted to give you a quick preview of some changes you'll start to see in early 2015.

Starting this month, we will begin the rollout of our next-generation servers, based on Intel's Haswell CPU platform. The first deployment of our Haswell servers will be a new Europe zone (europe-west1-d), scheduled to come online in the next few weeks, and all new zones that we launch in 2015 will be built with our new Haswell servers.

We have also started work on upgrading existing zones with our new Haswell servers, starting with us-central1-b. Beginning in early February, new VMs created in us-central1-b will land on the new Haswell servers and thus have access to the Haswell CPU features.

Based on our own testing with standard benchmarks and workload analysis, our Haswell VMs provide roughly similar or better performance compared to our current Ivybridge VMs. Of course, for workloads that take advantage of the new Haswell CPU features, you will see the performance gains you would expect from workloads tuned for specific Haswell CPU features (e.g., AVX2).

We will provide more details on our Haswell VMs as part of the europe-west1-d launch and as the us-central1-b cutover date in February draws near. We will also provide details on other upcoming zone upgrades in US, Europe, and Asia as they approach.

If you have specific questions or concerns, we'd love to hear from you. As always, please send us any feedback via the normal channels.

Thank you for your support,

--ScottVW, on behalf of the Google Cloud Platform

[gce-announce]

Hello again,

We just wanted to provide a quick update on the activities we talked about here back in January.

In case you missed it, our first Haswell Zone, europe-west1-d, went live a month ago and we just brought up our second one, us-central1-c, last week.

We also wanted to provide an update on the hardware upgrades we're doing in us-central1-b. It has taken a little longer than we expected, but the server and network upgrades are proceeding apace now and we're close to being ready to schedule all new VMs in us-central1-b on the new servers.

So, we're happy to say that starting on March 30th, 2015, all VMs started in us-central1-b will run on our new Haswell server platform. After March 30th, you will also be able to restart existing instances, which will shut them down cleanly and start them back up on Haswell. This also applies to existing VMs that are currently stopped; starting them up again after March 30th will bring them up on our new Haswells as well.

We would like to encourage everyone to start planning to restart your long-running VMs in us-central1-b after March 30th, to take advantage of the new platform and so we can continue replacing the remaining Sandy Bridge machines with our shiny new Haswells.

If you have specific questions or concerns, we'd love to hear from you. As always, please send us any feedback via the normal channels.

Thank you for your support,

--ScottVW, on behalf of the Google Cloud Platform