We’ve continued to ship features and tools to make it easier to build your application on Google Compute Engine. In addition, Compute Engine played a key role in a number of recent customer success stories - including CI&T and Coca Cola, Screenz and ABC’s Rising Star, AllTheCooks, and Fastly and Brightcove. Here are a few more updates for Google Compute Engine we wanted to share.



New Zones in US and Asia

We've added a third zone to both us-central1 and asia-east1 regions, making it easier to use Compute Engine to run systems like MongoDB that use a quorum-based architecture for high availability. The new zones, us-central1-f and asia-east1-c, both support transparent maintenance right out of the gate.



SSD Persistent Disk is generally available

On June 16th, we announced the limited preview of SSD-backed persistent disks, which gives you great price and performance for high-IOPS workloads. On June 25th at Google I/O, we made SSD persistent disks generally available in all Google Compute Engine zones. For a great overview of Google Cloud Platform’s block storage options, including how to decide which one is best suited for your use case, watch this video by our storage guru, Jay Judkowitz. Visit the docs pages to find additional details, including instructions on how to use persistent disks with Compute Engine. Finally, this whitepaper gives you a great overview of best practices for using persistent disks.



Easier image creation from persistent disk

Speaking of persistent disks, we've made it easier for developers to create custom images right from their root persistent disks. You can now specify an existing persistent disk as the source for your Images:insert API call or gcutil addimage CLI command. To get the full scoop, be sure to check out the image creation documentation. Image creation from persistent disk makes it possible to create custom images for your Windows instances too.



-Posted by Scott Van Woudenberg, Product Manager