Google has opened up its Compute Engine to Cloud Platform Gold Support customers. In addition to this availability expansion, Google has added several new features with add-on benefit of reduced pricing. The company recently announced a 4% reduction on all Compute Engine pricing. With this expansion, Google has stepped forward to its goal of enabling a new generation of applications with direct access to the capabilities of Google’s vast computing infrastructure.

According to Google’s blog post, it collected user feedback to add new features in the Compute Engine, including:

• Options to boot from persistent disks mounted as the root file system, persistent disk snapshots, the ability to checkpoint and restore the contents of network resident persistent disks on demand, and the ability to attach and detach persistent disks from running instances.
• Google Cloud Console (preview) that allows administering all your Google Cloud Platform services via a unified interface.
• Five new instance type families (diskless versions of our standard instance types, plus diskful and diskless versions of high-memory and high-CPU configurations), with 16 new instance types.
• Two new supported zones in Europe, which provide lower latency and higher performance for our European customers.
• An enhanced metadata server, with the ability to support recursive queries, blocking gets and selectable response formats, along with support for updating virtual machine tags and metadata on running instances.

Giving its special “Google touch”, the company also introduced a treat called the World Wide Maze Chrome Experiment that uses the structure of any website submitted to build a 3D marble maze. Developed by the Chrome team in Japan, this game converts any web site of your choice into an interactive, three dimensional maze that can be navigated remotely using smartphone.