Google Cloud launches sole-tenant nodes for improved compliance and utilisation

Google Cloud has announced the launch of sole-tenant nodes on Google Compute Engine – helping customers in various industries around compliance in the process. The new service, which is currently in beta availability, gives customers ownership of all VMs, hypervisor and host hardware, going against the traditional cloud use case of multi-tenant architecture and shared resources. “Normally, VM instances run on physical hosts that may be shared by many customers,” explained Google’s Manish Dalwadi and Bryan Nairn in a blog post confirming the news. “With sole-tenant nodes, you have the host all to yourself.” This will potentially be good news to companies in finance and healthcare, along with other firms who adopt an all-data-is-equal-but-some-data-is-more-equal-than-others mindset. Organisations with strict compliance and regulatory requirements can use sole-tenant nodes to ensure physical separation of compute resources in the cloud, while Google also noted that companies can achieve higher levels of utilisation if they are creative with their instance placements and machine types launched on sole-tenant nodes. The move puts Google in line with Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft. The former, for example, offers EC2 Dedicated Hosts, a physical server with EC2 instance capacity dedicated to the user, as well as Dedicated Instances. An AWS document outlines the differencesbetween the two; apart from the straightforward difference in terms of per-host and per-instance billing, Dedicated Hosts offers visibility on sockets and physical cores, targeted instance placement and bring your own license (BYOL).