More than virtual machines

While Compute Engine provides a means to create and manage VMs on Google's infrastructure, the platform extends far beyond that. Google offers a wide variety of auxiliary services and features for effectively managing production systems. Developers can leverage metadata servers to externalize configuration, manage instance groups to scale, and provide high availability, intelligent load balancers to route network traffic to the nearest VMs and design custom health checks to ensure those load balancers direct traffic to healthy instances. The list of features and integrations is extremely long and growing.