Local SSD has shown fantastic price-performance throughout beta, and today we are excited to announce that it's now generally available to Google Compute Engine customers in all regions around the world.

The Local SSD feature lets customers attach between 1 and 4 SSD partitions of 375 GB to any full core VM and have dedicated use of those partitions. And, it provides an extremely high number of IOPS (680k random 4K read IOPS). Unlike Persistent Disk, Local SSD doesn’t have redundancy. This is ideal for highly demanding applications that provide their own replication (such as many modern databases and Hadoop), as well as for scratch space for intense computational applications. Local SSD is also a great supplement for memory due to high IOPS and low price per GB.

Local SSD is competitively priced at $0.218/GB/month. For those used to buying Local SSD attached to VMs, this comes to $0.0003/GB/hour. If re-calculated as price per-IOPS, it comes to the extremely low price of $0.00048/read-IOPS/month.

We’ve had a fantastic response to the beta of Local SSD. For example, Cloud Harmony has shown that Google Compute Engine Local SSD achieves the highest number of 4K random IOPS across all of the VM-storage combinations tested. And it’s even better if normalized for price!

In addition, we’ve already received positive feedback from our customers. Aerospike achieved RAM-like performance and 15x cost advantage with the use of Local SSD as a supplement for RAM on their NoSQL database. And Gyazo.com is using Local SSD as a supplement for RAM for MongoDB, which works out perfectly due to low price and high performance of Local SSD. Isshu Rakusai from Gyazo.com said: “Local SSD on Google Compute Engine is very fast. It has allowed us to decrease our RAM usage, and made us more cost efficient.”

Learn more in the local SSD beta announcement or product documentation. And try our top IOPS with your VM.

- Posted by Kirill Tropin, Product Manager