Does anyone here have experience using Google's compute engine? In particular, I'm curious to know what the reliability is like, and how performant the storage is.
(I'm a Google employee, so take what I say with a grain of salt.)
I just took ownership of the godoc.org documentation service, and am running it on Compute Engine. It's been a great experience so far.
I've noticed a few benefits that Compute Engine has over EC2 (the other virtual machine service that I have used). The "gcutil" command line tool is more intuitive, Google's Cloud Console is more responsive than the AWS console, the general performance is better (especially disk and startup time), Compute supports live migration of running VMs (avoid downtime), and finally Compute bills by the minute, not the hour, so you can spin up a bunch of high-spec VMs for a quick test without running up big charges (I got a little burned by this with EC2, in the past).
Note that this is a year-old article. It also doesn't address reliability; it focuses on common performance benchmarks. The article links to a GitHub repo with some performance benchmarks you can run yourself.
