European alternatives to Google Compute Engine

Google Compute Engine is the virtual-machine service of Google Cloud. Google previewed it in June 2012 and made it generally available in December 2013. You pick a predefined machine type or, on most general-purpose series, a custom mix of vCPU and memory; attach persistent disks; and pay per second after a one-minute minimum.

Three things set it apart from the other hyperscalers’ VM services. The older N1, N2, N2D, C2, M1 and M2 series earn sustained-use discounts of up to 20 or 30% automatically when they run for most of a month, with no commitment, although the newer E2, N4 and C3 series do not. Most VMs live-migrate to another host during maintenance instead of rebooting; VMs with GPUs do not. And each of Google’s 13 European regions has three zones.

Those zones are the unit that matters when something breaks. On 20 October 2026 a power event took zone europe-west2-b in London offline for about eight hours, and The Register and heise reported outages at Revolut, Lloyds Bank, HSBC, Royal Mail, DPD and others. Google’s own advice during the incident was to move workloads to another zone or region.

The always-free e2-micro instance runs only in three US regions. Compute Engine is owned by Google LLC, a subsidiary of Alphabet Inc. (Nasdaq: GOOGL).