Compute Engine — Virtual Machines
Rent raw virtual servers from Google. Maximum control, but you manage the OS, patches, scaling, and everything else.
is the simplest idea: you rent a computer in Google's data center. You pick the CPU, the RAM, the disk, the OS, and you get SSH access. It's like renting a bare apartment — you decide what to put inside.
You pay for it every second it's running. Stop it → you only pay for the disk. Delete it → you pay nothing.
It's the most flexible option: you can run literally anything (a website, a game server, a database, a batch job). But it's also the most work: you install software, you update the OS, you handle crashes, you scale manually.
Modern teams rarely start with Compute Engine for web apps — they start with (next card). But VMs are still the right choice for legacy software, special OS needs, or heavy workloads that don't fit in a container.
Rough comparison: Compute Engine = AWS EC2 = Azure Virtual Machines. Same concept, different branding.
Grounded on https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/overview
Next up
Cloud Run — Serverless containers
Deploy a container and forget about servers: Cloud Run runs it, scales it to zero when idle, scales up under load, and gives you an HTTPS URL.