Google LLC today launched a new tier of general-purpose virtual machines with “dynamic resource management” capabilities that help ensure a lower total cost of ownership for many kinds of application workloads.

The new VMs, the E2 family, are targeted at workloads that don’t need such a large instance type or access to graphics processing units or local solid state storage, June Yang, Google Cloud’s director of product management, wrote in a blog post.

The E2 VMs offer significant savings because they run on a custom central processing unit scheduler that dynamically maps virtual CPU and memory to a physical CPU and memory. That helps ensure the VMs are more efficient, with customers billed only for the compute power they actually use.

Yang said the dynamic resource management features ensure the E2 VMs provide performance comparable to Google’s N1 family of VMs, but with average total-cost-of-ownership savings of 31%.

“Your VMs get reliable and sustained performance at a consistent low price point,” Yang said. “Unlike comparable options from other cloud providers, E2 VMs can sustain high CPU load without artificial throttling or complicated pricing.”

The new VMs are extremely flexible too, with 15 predefined configurations available ranging from just 2 virtual CPUs and 2GB of memory, up to 16 CPUs and 128 gigabytes of memory.

“These new machine types are a great fit for a broad range of workloads including web servers, business-critical applications, small-to-medium sized databases and development environments,” Yang said.

In addition, Google is unveiling new “shared-core instances” that are similar to its f1 and g1 small machine types. They also come with dynamic resource management features that make them a fit for small workloads such as “microservices and development environments that don’t require a full vCPU,” Yang said.

Google said the new E2 VMs are available in beta test mode starting today in eight regions, including Iowa, South Carolina, Oregon, Northern Virginia, Belgium, Netherlands, Taiwan and Singapore, with additional regions planned for later.

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