Google has made an interesting move to woo developers to its cloud platform by allowing them to create compute images with customized memory and virtual CPU configurations.

The new feature is called Custom Machine Types, and can basically be thought of as a way for users to build their own instances to fit the needs of whatever app they’re hoping to run on it.

Developers can choose to build an instance with between one and 32 vCPUs supported by even numbers of processors. Developers can also add up to 6.5 GiB (gibabyte, equal to 1.074 gigabytes) of memory to each vCPU in an instance.

By allow developers to create custom instance types, it makes it possible for them to cook up an optimum configuration for each application, without paying for extra capabilities they don’t need. Google itself says a custom instance with 12 vCPUs and 45GiB of memory would cost $321.75 a month, compared to $408.80 per month for its closest ‘standard’ instance. Oh and did we mention it’s also super-easy to set up?

Google’s product manager Sami Iqram said custom instances are only available on CentOS, CoreOS, Debian, OpenSUSE and Ubuntu for now, but support for additional operating systems will be added at a later date.

The Custom Machine Types feature is a strong pricing play by Google, because rivals including Amazon Web Services and Microsoft only let user choose from a selection of preset instance types. With Google, developers suddenly find much greater flexibility, and that fits with the company’s stated goal of building a robust cloud platform aimed primarily at developers.

Google needs to do something because its 3.6 percent share of the infrastructure-as-a-service market leaves it trailing its rivals in a distant fourth place, according to Wikibon’s most recent analysis. Many analysts attribute Google’s poor performance to its somewhat limited feature list, and so Custom Machine Types is one capability that might help to set it apart.

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