Compute Engine release notes

Generally available: You can now modify licenses attached to your disks. Previously, licenses on disk resources were immutable. You had to delete and recreate disks, or engage our support team to change licenses.

This feature provides greater flexibility for managing your disk licenses. You can now:

• Append, remove, replace, and view the history of license updates.
• Perform in-place license upgrades, such as Ubuntu to Ubuntu Pro, using the gcloud CLI and REST.
• Switch from PAYG to BYOS billing models.
• Review license changes and restrictions and append a RHEL ELS license to a newer version.

For more information on how to manage licenses, see Manage licenses.

Generally available: You can specify a custom ephemeral external IPv6 address when creating an instance. For more information, see Create instances that use IPv6 addresses.

Preview: You can use future reservation requests in calendar mode to reserve capacity for creating VMs with TPUs attached. This feature helps you obtain and reserve high-demand resources to run generative artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), or high performance computing (HPC) workloads.

For more information, see the following pages:

• About future reservation requests in calendar mode

• Create a future reservation request in calendar mode

Generally available: You can specify a custom ephemeral internal IPv6 address when creating an instance. For more information, see Create instances that use IPv6 addresses.

Generally available: Configure the host error detection time, which is the the maximum amount of time Compute Engine waits to restart or terminate an instance after detecting that the instance is unresponsive. For more information, see Set VM host maintenance policy.

Generally available: Stockholm, Sweden, Europe (europe-north2-a,b,c) has launched with N4, C3D highmem, C4 highmem, and E2 machine types available in all three zones. For more information, see Cloud locations and VM instance pricing.

Preview: You can now modify which machine types are recommended, so that the generated recommendations only include your preferred machine series. You can also change the metrics used to generate memory recommendations to improve the accuracy of the recommendations. For more information, see Configure machine type recommendations.

Generally available: Managed instance groups (MIGs) let you create pools of suspended and stopped virtual machine (VM) instances. You can manually suspend and stop VMs in a MIG to save on costs, or use suspended and stopped pools to speed up scale out operations of your MIG. For more information, see About suspending and stopping VMs in a MIG.

Compute Engine is enabled for use with Cloud KMS Autokey.

Using keys generated by Autokey can help you consistently align with industry standards and recommended practices for data security, including the HSM protection level, separation of duties, key rotation, location, and key specificity. Keys requested using Autokey function identically to other Cloud HSM keys with the same settings.

For more information, see About disk encryption. To learn more about Cloud KMS Autokey, see Autokey overview.

Generally available: Instance flexibility in a managed instance group (MIG) lets you configure multiple machine types in the group. This can improve resource availability for applications that require large-scale capacity and high-demand hardware. Support for Terraform has also been added. For more information, see About instance flexibility in MIGs.

Preview: Use the disk performance status metric to monitor the health of your Hyperdisk or Persistent Disk volumes. This metric indicates whether your disks might be affected by adverse events within Compute Engine.

To learn more, see Monitor disk health.

Generally available: Queretaro, Mexico, North America (northamerica-south1-a,b,c) has launched with E2, N4, C4, and C3D VMs available in all three zones. For more information, see Global Locations and VM instance pricing.

Generally available: An updated version of the gVNIC driver for Windows offers improved network performance and support for Jumbo frames. For more information, see Update to the latest gVNIC driver for Windows.

Preview: You can create GPU VMs all at once in a regional managed instance group (MIG) by using resize requests. This feature was previously available only for zonal MIGs. For more information, see About resize requests in a MIG.

Generally available: You can autoscale a regional MIG with a BALANCED target distribution shape. With the BALANCED shape, the autoscaler is aware of the capacity in each zone and creates VMs in zones that have resource availability. For more information, see Autoscaling a regional MIG.

Generally available: In addition to the A3 High machine type that has 8 NVIDIA H100 GPUs attached, we now have smaller machine types available that have 1, 2, or 4 NVIDIA H100 GPUs attached. These smaller machine types are ideal for workloads such as inference, simulations, and small-scale training.

To get started, review A3 High machine types.

Public preview: Instance flexibility in a managed instance group (MIG) lets you configure multiple machine types in the group. This can improve resource availability for applications that require large-scale capacity and high-demand hardware. For more information, see About instance flexibility in MIGs.

Generally available: Multi-writer support for Hyperdisk Balanced disks. Up to 8 VMs can simultaneously read from and write to the same disk. For more information, see Share disks between VMs.

Generally available: General purpose C4 VMs on the Intel Emerald Rapids CPU. The C4 machine series offers consistently high performance with up to 192 vCPUs and 1.5 TB of DDR5 memory, and support for Hyperdisk storage.

C4 VMs are available in the following regions and zones:

• Singapore - asia-southeast1-a,b
• Belgium - europe-west1-b,c
• Netherlands - europe-west4-a,b,c
• Iowa - us-central1-a,b,c
• South Carolina - us-east1-b,c,d
• Virginia - us-east4-a,b,c

Generally available: C3 bare metal machine types are available in the C3 machine series. Bare metal instances let you create an instance with direct access to the machine's CPU and memory, without a virtualization layer in the middle. With bare metal instances, you can access all the raw compute resources of the server. For more information, see the C3 machine series.

Generally available: Hyperdisk ML, block storage designed specifically for high-performance AI workloads. Each Hyperdisk ML volume can achieve up to 1,200,000 MBps of throughput. For large-scale training and inference workloads, you can attach a single Hyperdisk ML volume to up to 2,500 VM instances. For more information, see About Hyperdisk.