It’s not alone: AWS introduced its own Arm-based chip, Graviton, in 2018 to reduce the cost of running internal cloud workloads such as Amazon retail IT, and now 50% of new AWS instances run on it. Microsoft, too, recently developed an Arm chip, Cobalt, to run Microsoft 365 and to offer Azure services.
Google’s N4A instances will be available across services including Compute Engine for running virtual machines directly, Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) for running containerized workloads, and Dataproc for big data and analytics. They will be accessible in the us-central1 (Iowa), us-east4 (N. Virginia), europe-west3 (Frankfurt) and europe-west4 (Netherlands) regions initially.
The company describes N4A as a complement to the C4A instances it launched last October. These are designed for heavier workloads such as high-traffic web and application servers, ad servers, game servers, data analytics, databases of any size, and CPU-based AI and machine learning.
Also coming “soon” is C4A Metal, a bare-metal instance for specialized workloads in a non-virtualized environment, such as custom hypervisors, security workloads, or CI/CD pipelines.
