This content originally appeared on DEV Community and was authored by Latchu@DevOps
Virtual Machine Types
Choosing the right VM family in GCP can save cost and boost performance.
General Purpose
- E2 → Cost-optimized (Web serving, Dev/Test)
- N2/N2D → Balanced (Enterprise apps, DBs, Web & App serving)
- T2D (Tau) → Scale-out optimized (Best price/performance for scale-out workloads)
Workload Optimized
- C2 → Compute optimized (HPC, Gaming, Scientific modeling)
- M2 → Memory optimized (SAP HANA, real-time analytics, in-memory DBs)
- A2 → Accelerator optimized (ML, HPC, GPU-heavy workloads)
đź’ˇ Rule of thumb:
👉 Use E2/N2 for general apps,
👉 C2/M2/A2 for specialized high-performance workloads.
GCE Machine Families
GCE - Machine Types
- We can choose machine type based on CPU, Memory and Disk needed for us.
- As number of vCPU’s increases accordingly memory, disk and networking sizes increase
Google Compute Engine – Customized Machine Type
Custom Machine Types: We can configure our Customized Machine Type
- Desired vCPU Cores
- Desired Memory
- Desired GPU
If predefined machine types doesn’t match our workload needs we can create a VM with custom machine type
This feature is available for specific Machine families only
- General Purpose: E2, E2 shared-core, N2, N2D, N1
Billed per vCPUs and memory provisioned
Google Compute Engine - GPUs
What is GPU ?
- Graphics Processing Unit
Where do you use GPUs?
- Graphic Intensive workloads
- Machine Learning
- Scientific Computing (Math Intensive)
- 3D Visualization
How to use GPUs in GCP GCE ?
- Machine Family: GPU
- Boot Disk: Use Deep Learning Linux OS for supporting GPUs
Which machine families support GPUs?
- N1 (general-purpose) - Attach the GPU to the VM during, or after VM creation
- A3, A2, and G2 (accelerator-optimized) - GPUs are automatically attached when you create the VM
- You can add GPU to preemptible and Spot VM Instances
GPUs and host maintenance
- VMs with attached GPUs cannot live migrate and must stop for host maintenance events
GPUs and block storage
- You can add Local SSDs to VMs that have GPUs attached
- Not all GPU types support Local SSDs
This content originally appeared on DEV Community and was authored by Latchu@DevOps
Latchu@DevOps | Sciencx (2025-08-21T03:50:24+00:00) Part-17: 🚀Google Cloud Compute Engine – Graphic Process Unit and Machine Families. Retrieved from https://www.scien.cx/2025/08/21/part-17-%f0%9f%9a%80google-cloud-compute-engine-graphic-process-unit-and-machine-families/
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