Google advertises “sustained use discounts” on its Compute Engine service. They mention on their documentation this: “we automatically give you discounted prices” for workloads that are long-running. The Compute Engine uses a worldwide fiber network, where customers can set up virtual servers within clusters with ease. Again, they emphasize server load-balancing and fail-over, so multiple servers can provide the work while set up of these virtual instances in multiple locations [regions, zones] provides for fail-over in the event that one region goes down: although rare, it does happen.
The Goggle Cloud Platform offers a plethora of services within their cloud admin interface. I started with Compute Engine, doing a quickstart Cluster set up.
![](https://riguy.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/Kub1.jpg)
The set up is super fast. It is a simple cluster pool. Of course, most clusters would be at least a little bigger than this, and in fact could be huge.
![](https://riguy.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/Kub2.jpg)
The real strength to these Compute Engine clusters of VM instances is grouping. Having groups of these clusters of multiple virtual instances provides the true fail-over and load balancing that is so essential to businesses and organizations worldwide.
![](https://riguy.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/Kub3.jpg)