If you’ve been deploying N2 VMs on Google Cloud for the last few years it’s time to make a change. The latest generation 3 and 4 machine series deliver more performance at lower cost. How they do it isn’t one thing but a mix including more powerful CPUs, Titanium infrastructure enhancements including Hyperdisk and offload adapters, updated hypervisor software and NUMA aligned scheduling logic, and more. The tech is amazing, but most folks just care about what it means for their workloads. I recently built a couple of demos for Google Cloud NEXT to showcase the benefits for two scenarios: Databases and Software Development. Check ‘em out!

Databases

Imagine you need a MySQL database for an OLTP workload of 70k DML operations per second with about 90 GiB of data. Lets map those requirements to both an N2 and a C4 machine types, with a VM shape loaded to no more than 70% utilization. Doing that I discovered that with C4 the the cost dropped by 20% and 95th percentile latency improved by more than 4x! Cheaper and faster, that’s my kind of combo.

Software Development

Build jobs are often CPU intensive and building the open source Chromium browser is no different. With over 50,000 build steps of mostly C++ code compilation it can take a few hours to complete. For this one I ran it on both an N2 and C4 standard-16 shapes and found that on the C4 it finished in 25% less time and 25% lower cost. Cheaper and faster, again, music to my ears.

So what are you waiting for? For new workloads, or to give a bit more power to your existing ones, try the latest generation VM series available now on Google Cloud!