Google Cloud introduces its first Arm-based VMs

Google Cloud on Wednesday announced its first VM family based on the Arm architecture, the Tau T2A. 

Arm-based chips are already ubiquitous in mobile phones, but organizations have started adopting them to run scale-out, cloud-native workloads — like web servers, containerized microservices, data-logging processing, media transcoding or large-scale Java applications. Amazon Web Services has been building its own Arm-based processors for years, while earlier this year, Microsoft announced Azure VMs with Ampere Altra Arm-based processors. 

Powered by Ampere Altra Arm-based processors, T2A VMs come in multiple predefined VM shapes, with up to 48 vCPUs per VM and 4GB of memory per vCPU. They offer up to 32 Gbps networking bandwidth and a range of network-attached storage options. 

The new VM family follows last year’s launch of Tau VMs to Google Cloud Compute Engine. Those chips target customers looking for a price-performance improvement without redesigning their Arm architecture applications. 

“We are excited to extend the rich choices we already offered with Intel and AMD and enter the Arm ecosystem to provide our customers with even more choice and flexibility,” Google Cloud VP of infrastructure Sachin Gupta said to reporters this week. 

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Customers can now preview these VMs in select regions in North America, Europe and Asia. 

Google Cloud is also offering in preview a new fully managed service called Google Cloud Batch, which provisions, schedules and executes batch jobs. The service should benefit major use cases for throughput-oriented computing, such as weather forecasting and electronic design automation. 

“We are dedicated to making the cloud easier for our customers to operate at scale,” Gupta said.