Sunnyvale, Calif., [June 17, 2021] -- Today, Google Cloud announced price-performance optimized Tau VMs for scale-out workloads. Tau VMs provide customers with a leading combination of performance, price, and easy integration for scale out applications. Part of the Compute Engine product portfolio, the first instance in the Tau VM family delivers more than 40% higher price-performance1 than offerings from any other leading cloud provider. 

“Customers across every industry are dealing with more demanding and data-intensive workloads and looking for strategic ways to speed up performance and reduce costs,” said Thomas Kurian, CEO, Google Cloud. “Our work with key strategic partners like AMD has allowed us to broaden our offerings and deliver customers the best price performance for compute-heavy, business-critical applications-- all on the cleanest cloud in the industry.” 

Built on the latest 3rd Gen AMD EPYC™ processors, the first instance of the Tau VM family  provides the highest price-performance for scale-out workloads amongst leading cloud providers. The AMD EPYC processor-based VMs also preserve x86 compatibility so that customers don’t need to waste precious technical resources and time redesigning applications and instead can immediately take full advantage of x86 processing speed and ecosystem depth. Multiple VM shapes are available, with up to 60vCPUs per VM and 4GB of memory per vCPU, providing the flexibility customers need to control cost. Since many scale-out applications are built on containers, Google Kubernetes Engine support is available from day one.

“We have entered a high-performance computing megacycle led by the accelerated digital transformation of businesses and industries that is re-shaping cloud computing,” said AMD President and CEO Dr. Lisa Su.  “We work extremely closely with strategic partners like Google Cloud to ensure our AMD EPYC processors are ideally suited to meet the growing customer demand for more compute, more performance and more scalability. The new Tau VM T2D Instances take advantage of the performance and efficiency leadership of the 3rd Gen AMD EPYC processors to provide Google Cloud customers with the latest compute capabilities to meet their scale-out workloads.”

“The new Tau VM family is an important expansion to Google Cloud’s already comprehensive Compute Engine portfolio designed to drive cost efficiency for large-scale, cloud workloads,” said Matt Eastwood, IDC Senior Vice President, Enterprise Infrastructure, Cloud, Developers and Alliances. “Tau VMs deliver on both fronts – an attractive combination of performance and price compared to other leading cloud providers. The initial testing results for Tau VMs demonstrate the ongoing commitment Google has to innovating in scale-out platforms.”

Leading cloud native organizations experience increased performance with Tau VMs

Independent testing of the new Tau VMs by Google Cloud customers and partners demonstrate material performance gains over existing compute offerings from other leading cloud providers. Hyper-scale, cloud-native enterprises like Snap Inc. and Twitter, are constantly looking for ways to reduce total cost of ownership (TCO) of infrastructure services. As their businesses grow rapidly, with hundreds of millions of daily users across each platform, Snap and Twitter need computing power designed to help them keep pace with customer growth rates. DoiT International, a leading provider of public cloud optimization, governance and expertise, partners with Google Cloud to provide the latest technology innovations to their customers around the world to enable their digital transformation journeys.

“At Snap, it is critical for our business to continue improving our scale-out compute infrastructure for key Snapchat capabilities like AR, Lenses, Spotlight and Maps,” said Cody Powell, Senior Engineering Manager, Snap Inc. “We were impressed when we tested Google Cloud’s new Tau VMs with Google Kubernetes Engine. While it's early days, we believe we can gain double digits in infrastructure performance improvements for key workloads - enabling us to do more with less and invest even more in new features for our amazing Snapchat community."

"High performance at the right price point is a critical consideration as we work to serve the global public conversation," said Nick Tornow, Platform Lead, Twitter. “We are excited by initial tests that show potential for double digit performance improvement. We are collaborating with Google Cloud to more deeply evaluate benefits on price and performance for specific compute workloads that we can realize through use of the new Tau VM family.”

"DoiT partners with leading cloud vendors who are focused on growth and cost optimization, ” said Yoav Toussia-Cohen, CEO, DoiT International. “In our preliminary testing of Google’s new Tau VMs with the Coremark benchmark, we were thrilled to see the incredible performance at 50% better than a comparable ARM-based offering from another leading public cloud. With Tau VMs, Google Cloud has set a new bar for price-performance, making the cloud even more accessible to digital native companies. We are excited to bring Google’s Tau VMs to our joint customers."

1 Based on SPECcpu2017 Rate benchmark with vendor-provided compilers from Intel, AMD and GCC for Arm. Details on benchmark results can be found here.