Google has announced a new cloud service called Compute Engine, it offers a large scale Linux virtualisation which will be hosted on Google’s own infrastructure. It is currently in “limited Preview” – see it

This will be Google’s attempt at “Infrastructure as a service” (IaaS).  This is similar to Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2).

The Google APIs console is designed for you to create and manage multiple API “projects” at once. Each project is a collection of services and resources with a common set of team members and billing information.

Projects
A project can have instances, firewalls and other resources, as you specify. Projects have team members that can collaborate on and access the project to varying degrees.

Instances
Instances (virtual machine instances) are the heart of Google Compute Engine. A Google Compute Engine instance is a virtual machine running on Linux. You can choose to customise as much of your instances as you like, including the hardware, OS, disk and other configuration options.

Networks
A project has one or more Network resources that define how instances communicate with each other and with other networks or the outside world. Each instance belongs to a single network and any communication between instances in different networks must be through a public IP address.

Disks
Every instance is allocated 10GB of root ephemeral disk space. Ephemeral disk is tied to the instance’s lifetime. If an instance is stopped for whatever reason the data will be lost. You can also request extra ephemeral space or allocate a persistent disk to your instance.

Pricing
Pricing information can be found
There are currently 4 machine types – they have different memory, CPU and disk arrangements. Pricing starts at $0.145 per hour.