Google has made available its updated Google Compute Engine, offering virtual machines that are performant, scalable, and more secure feauring encryption of data at rest. The service offers a pool of servers on which customers can run various versions of Linux, paying for usage and assured that the systems will be up and running at least 99.95 percent of the time.

Google says the new Compute Engine is available with 24/7 support and a 99.95% monthly SLA for mission-critical workloads.

During Preview, Compute Engine supported the Debian and Centos Linux distributions, customized with a Google-built kernel. Now it supports any out-of-the-box Linux distribution (including SELinux and CoreOS) as well as any kernel or software, including Docker, FOG, xfs and aufs. Google also announced support for SUSE and Red Hat Enterprise Linux (in Limited Preview) and FreeBSD.

Google is introducing transparent maintenance that combines software and data center technologies with live migration technology to perform proactive maintenance while virtual machines are running. Furthermore, in the event of a failure, Google automatically restarts VMs and get them back online in minutes. Google has already rolled out this feature to its US zones, with others to follow in the coming months.

Google is also launching three new instance types in Limited Preview with up to 16 cores and 104 gigabytes of RAM.

In addition, the company is lowering the price of Persistent Disk by 60% per Gigabyte and dropping I/O charges. I/O available to a volume scales linearly with size, and the largest Persistent Disk volumes have up to 700% higher peak I/O capability.

Last but not least, Google is lowering prices on its most popular standard Compute Engine instances by 10% in all regions.

The changes to Google Compute Engine service are aimed at attracting corporate customers away from Amazon, Microsoft and others that are betting businesses will access computing power from large, centralized data centers instead of their own systems.