Last year, Google unveiled Compute Engine at Google I/O, apparently seeking to compete with Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure for the cloud computing needs of businesses.

In May, Google made it available for everyone, and added sub-hour billing charges for instances in one-minute increments, shared-core instances, advanced routing features and disk support for up to 10 terabytes per volume.

Today, Google announced general availability with a 99.95% monthly SLA and 24/7 support, and has launched support for Red Hat, SUSE, FreeBSD, and all other Linux variants.

They’ve also added three new 16-core instance types in limited preview.

Google has also lowered prices for standard instances by 10% in all regions.

“You now have virtual machines that have the performance, reliability, security and scale of Google’s own infrastructure,” says Greg DeMichillie, director of product management.

“At Google, we have found that regular maintenance of hardware and software infrastructure is critical to operating with a high level of reliability, security and performance,” says VP, Cloud Platform, Ari Balogh. “We’re introducing transparent maintenance that combines software and data center innovations with live migration technology to perform proactive maintenance while your virtual machines keep running. You now get all the benefits of regular updates and proactive maintenance without the downtime and reboots typically required. Furthermore, in the event of a failure, we automatically restart your VMs and get them back online in minutes. We’ve already rolled out this feature to our US zones, with others to follow in the coming months.”

“Building highly scalable and reliable applications starts with using the right storage,” he says. “Our Persistent Disk service offers you strong, consistent performance along with much higher durability than local disks. Today we’re lowering the price of Persistent Disk by 60% per Gigabyte and dropping I/O charges so that you get a predictable, low price for your block storage device. I/O available to a volume scales linearly with size, and the largest Persistent Disk volumes have up to 700% higher peak I/O capability.”

More on Persistent Disk here.

Google counts Snapchat, Cooladata, Mendelics, Evite and Wix among its current Compute Engine customers. With today’s announcement, more businesses of all sizes can climb aboard.

Image: Google