Google Compute Engine (GCE) is the infrastructure as a service (IaaS) component of Google Cloud Platform which is built on the global infrastructure that runs Google's search engine, Gmail, YouTube and other services. Google Compute Engine enables users (utilising authentication based on OAuth 2.0) to launch virtual machines (VMs) on demand. VMs can be launched from the standard images or custom images created by users. Google Compute Engine can be accessed via the Developer Console, RESTful API or command-line interface (CLI).

Google announced Compute Engine on June 28, 2012 at Google I/O 2012 in a limited preview mode. In April 2013, GCE was made available to customers with Gold Support Package. On February 25, 2013, Google announced that RightScale was their first reseller. During Google I/O 2013, many features including sub-hour billing, shared-core instance types, larger persistent disks, enhanced SDN based networking capabilities and ISO/IEC 27001 certification got announced. GCE became available to everyone on May 15, 2013. Layer 3 load balancing came to GCE on August 7, 2013. Finally, on December 2, 2013, Google announced that GCE is generally available. It also expanded the OS support, enabled live migration of VMs, 16-core instances, faster persistent disks and lowered the price of standard instances.

At the Google Cloud Platform Live event on March 25, 2014, Urs Hölzle, Senior VP of technical infrastructure announced sustained usage discounts, support for Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2, Cloud DNS and Cloud Deployment Manager. On May 28, 2014, Google announced optimizations for LXC containers along with dynamic scheduling of Docker containers across a fleet of VM instances.

Google Compute Engine Unit (GCEU), which is pronounced as GQ, is an abstraction of computing resources. According to Google, 2.75 GCEUs represent the minimum power of one logical core (a hardware hyper-thread) based on the Sandy Bridge platform. The GCEU was created by Anthony F. Voellm out of a need to compare the performance of virtual machines offered by Google. It is approximated by the Coremark(TM) benchmark run as part of the PerfKitBenchmarker Open Source benchmark created by Google in partnership with many Cloud Providers.

Every Google Compute Engine instance starts with a disk resource called persistent disk. Persistent disk provides the disk space for instances and contains the root filesystem from which the instance boots. Persistent disks can be used as raw block devices. By default, Google Compute Engine uses SCSI for attaching persistent disks. Persistent Disks provide straightforward, consistent and reliable storage at a consistent and reliable price, removing the need for a separate local ephemeral disk. Persistent disks need to be created before launching an instance. Once attached to an instance, they can be formatted with the native filesystem. A single persistent disk can be attached to multiple instances in read-only mode. Each persistent disk can be up to 10 TB in size. Google Compute Engine encrypts the persistent disks with AES-128-CB, and this encryption is applied before the data leaves the virtual machine monitor and hits the disk. Encryption is always enabled and is transparent to Google Compute Engine users. The integrity of persistent disks is maintained via a HMAC scheme.

On June 18, 2014, Google announced support for SSD persistent disks. These disks deliver up to 30 IOPS per GB which is 20x more write IOPS and 100x more read IOPS than the standard persistent disks.

An image is a persistent disk that contains the operating system and root file system that is necessary for starting an instance. An image must be selected while creating an instance or during the creation of a root persistent disk. By default, Google Compute Engine installs the root filesystem defined by the image on a root persistent disk. Google Compute Engine provides CentOS and Debian images as standard Linux images. Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 images are a part of the premier operating system images which are available for an additional fee. Container Linux (formerly CoreOS), the lightweight Linux OS based on ChromiumOS is also supported on Google Compute Engine.

Google Compute Engine uses KVM as the hypervisor, and supports guest images running Linux and Microsoft Windows which are used to launch virtual machines based on the 64 bit x86 architecture. VMs boot from a persistent disk that has a root filesystem. The number of virtual CPUs, amount of memory supported by the VM is dependent on the machine type selected.