'Queue the Questions' AMA Event: VM Families - Join Here!

Google Cloud Community News & Announcements
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Welcome everyone to our ‘Queue the Questions’ AMA event on VM Families!

This week, we are going to answer your questions about the Google Compute Engine Virtual Machine Families.

You can find more information about the event here.

We are thrilled today to be joined by our special guests @ Moazzam, @ chelsie, and @SubraC, @jamiekinney to answer your questions about the multiple general purpose VMs to workload optimized VM families, including the new addition to our general purpose family, Tau.

Join us by asking your questions below! :down_arrow:

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Welcome everyone. Looking forward to addressing your questions here.

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What are Tau VMs?

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Hi Luis88,

Tau VMs are our newest addition to our Compute Engine VM family. Tau VMs are optimized for cost-effective performance primarily targeting scale-out workloads. For more information, please look at our blog : https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/compute/google-cloud-introduces-tau-vms

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When and how can I get access to Tau VMs?

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Hi Francisco04,

We are currently accepting requests to access the Preview of Tau VMs. GA is planned for later in the year. Please contact your Google Cloud account team if you would like early access to Tau T2D VMs.

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When should I use Tau T2D over other general purpose VMs?

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Thanks for the question MickyLynn!

Tau VMs have been designed to support scale-out workloads which benefit from higher per-vCPU performance. For example, Tau VMs offer excellent price-performance for horizontally scaled workloads like web and application serving, image processing, and media transcoding. Databases and other workloads that require our highest performance Local SSD and Persistent Disk storage may be better suited for our N2 and N2D general purpose VM families.

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I have a VM that I did not update to the latest LTS (UBUNTU 20.04) How can I update the image, to first 18.04 and then 20.04 via the console? I have a web server (apache) running a python/django? What’s the safest way to do this without losing my config or site? I am ok with a little downtime.

Welcome to Ubuntu 16.04.7 LTS (GNU/Linux 4.15.0-1098-gcp x86_64)

Do I follow the normal process of

New release ‘18.04.5 LTS’ available.
Run ‘do-release-upgrade’ to upgrade to it.

Any help appreciated.

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Hello! When should I use Local SSD vs. Persistent Disk?

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I’ve heard that GCE supports confidential computing. How are customers using this feature?

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Hi Eddyizm,

I recommend that you first take a backup of your VM so that you can easily revert back to your earlier configuration. For persistent disk, you can use the PD snapshot feature to backup your block storage. If you are storing any configuration or site data in GCS, you may also want to make a copy of that data.

Regarding the actual upgrade from Ubuntu 16.04.7 to 18.04.5, we have detailed documentation available here.

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Thank you!

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Hi Oliver00, Thank you for your question.
Yes, Google Cloud supports Confidential Computing and ecrypts data in-use with Confidential VMs and Confidential GKE nodes. Our Goal has been to make Confidential Computing easy. The transition to Confidential VMs is seamless- all workloads you run today can also run as Confidential VMs. No extra code changes to applications, just one checkbox to protect against rootkit and bootkits. Read more here: https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/identity-security/introducing-google-cloud-confidential-computing-with-confidential-vms.
More on Confidential GKE Nodes here: https://cloud.google.com/kubernetes-engine/docs/how-to/confidential-gke-nodes

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Does Google Cloud support GPU accelerated VMs?

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Hi there! What are Google Cloud Compute Engine differentiating features?

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Hi Daria_anderson1,

Google Cloud offers a number of storage options.

Local SSD (docs here) is our highest-performance block storage. Local SSD is typically used for high-performance filesystems, caching systems, and databases which are able to run on ephemeral storage.

Persistent disks are durable network storage devices that your instances can access like physical disks in a desktop or a server. The data on each persistent disk is distributed across several physical disks. Compute Engine manages the physical disks and the data distribution for you to ensure redundancy and optimal performance.

Persistent disks are located independently from your virtual machine (VM) instances, so you can detach or move persistent disks to keep your data even after you delete your instances. Persistent disk performance scales automatically with size, so you can resize your existing persistent disks or add more persistent disks to an instance to meet your performance and storage space requirements.

Google Cloud customers typically use Persistent Disks for the OS filesystem on their virtual machines and to provide storage for any workload that required highly-available, durable storage.

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Also, how should I determine which Google Cloud region to use? Thanks a lot!

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Hi Diannegibson401, Thanks for the question!
Within our Accelerator Optimized VM family, A2, we support Nvidia’s A100 GPU. Google Cloud is the only platform that provides up to 16 A100 GPUs attached to a single A2 vm for mega performance. Read more about what you can do with the Accelerator Optimized Family here: https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/compute/a2-vms-with-nvidia-a100-gpus-are-ga.
We also have T4 and V100 GPUs avaialble via our original N1 VM family. To know which regions and zones each GPU is available in check here: https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/gpus/gpu-regions-zones

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thank you!

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