C4A Virtual Machines
Google’s first Arm-based Axion processor powers C4A virtual machines. C4A provides regular, highmem, and highcpu machine series, and offers machine types with up to 72 vCPUs and 576 GB of DDR5 memory. Built on Titanium, it has network offloads and can achieve standard network speed of up to 50 Gbps and Tier_1 networking performance of up to 100 Gbps per virtual machine.
With up to 10% higher price performance than the newest Arm-based instances offered by top cloud providers, Google is excited to announce today the general availability of C4A virtual machines, the first Axion-based VM series. Web and app servers, containerized microservices, open-source databases, in-memory caches, data analytics engines, media processing, and AI inference applications are just a few of the general-purpose workloads that C4A virtual machines are an excellent choice for.
To provide constant performance, C4A virtual machines (VMs) are housed within a single node with Uniform Memory Access (UMA) and support sole tenant nodes. C4A makes use of the newest storage options from Google Cloud, such as Hyperdisk Extreme and Hyperdisk Balanced.
The C4A machine series, in brief:
- Is driven by Titanium and the Google Axion CPU.
- Supports 576 GB of DDR5 RAM and up to 72 virtual CPUs.
- Provides a variety of preset machine kinds.
- Supports up to 50 Gbps of bandwidth in a normal network configuration.
- Supports up to 100 Gbps of bandwidth for per-VM Tier_1 networking performance.
- Accepts the following choices for consumption and discounts:
- Discounts for resource-based and adaptable committed use
- Reservations
- Spot VMs
- Helps the PMU, or performance monitoring unit.
- Compact placement policies are not supported.
C4A machines types
C4A virtual machines have sizes ranging from 1 vCPU to 72 vCPUs and up to 576 GB of memory as standard configurations.
standard: 4 GB memory per vCPUhighcpu: 2 GB memory per vCPUhighmem: 8 GB memory per vCPU
| Shape | Specifications |
| Standard | 1:4 vCPU to memory |
| High memory | 1:8 vCPU to memory |
| High CPU | 1:2 vCPU to memory |
Supported disk types for C4A
C4A virtual machines can utilize the following Hyperdisk block storage and only support the NVMe disk interface:
- Hyperdisk Balanced (
hyperdisk-balanced) - Hyperdisk Extreme (
hyperdisk-extreme)
C4A doesn’t support Persistent Disk.
Limits on disk and capacity
A virtual machine (VM) can have a variety of hyperdisk kinds, but the total disk capacity (in TiB) of all disk types cannot be greater than:
- For machine types with less than 32 vCPUs: 257 TiB for all Hyperdisk
- For machine types with 32 or more vCPUs: 512 TiB for all Hyperdisk
Maximum number of disks | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Machine types | Hyperdisk per VM | Hyperdisk Balanced | Hyperdisk Throughput | Hyperdisk Extreme |
c4a-standard-1 | 8 | 8 | 0 | 0 |
c4a-standard-2 | 8 | 8 | 0 | 0 |
c4a-standard-4 | 16 | 16 | 0 | 0 |
c4a-standard-8 | 16 | 16 | 0 | 0 |
c4a-standard-16 | 32 | 32 | 0 | 0 |
c4a-standard-32 | 32 | 32 | 0 | 0 |
c4a-standard-48 | 32 | 32 | 0 | 0 |
c4a-standard-64 | 32 | 32 | 0 | 8 |
c4a-standard-72 | 32 | 32 | 0 | 8 |
C4A VM network support
gVNIC network interfaces are necessary for C4A instances. For regular networking, C4A instances can handle up to 50 Gbps of network bandwidth; for VM Tier_1 networking performance, they can handle up to 100 Gbps.
Make sure the operating system image you use is fully compatible with C4A before moving to C4A or setting up C4A virtual machines. The upgraded gVNIC driver is included in fully supported images, even if the guest OS displays the gve driver version as 1.0.0. Your C4A virtual machine may not be able to reach the maximum network bandwidth for C4A VMs if it is running an operating system with limited support, which includes an outdated version of the gVNIC driver.
The latest gVNIC driver can be manually installed if you use a custom OS image with the C4A machine series. It is advised to use the gVNIC driver version v1.3.0 or later while working with C4A virtual machines. To take advantage of new features and problem improvements, Google advises using the most recent version of the gVNIC driver.
With Titanium offload, C4A is designed to handle your most demanding workloads with up to 60% more energy efficiency and 65% better price performance compared to comparable current-generation x86-based instances technology and superior maintenance capabilities.
Key Google services like Bigtable, Spanner, BigQuery, F1 Query, Blobstore, Pub/Sub, Google Earth Engine, and the YouTube Ads platform have already begun implementing Axion-based servers in production due to these efficiency and performance improvements.
Customers of Google Cloud can use C4A in various services, such as Batch, Dataproc, Google Compute Engine, and Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE). Additionally, C4A virtual machines are currently previewing in Dataflow, with support for CloudSQL, AlloyDB, and other services on the horizon. The most widely used Linux operating systems, such as Container-Optimized OS, RHEL, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, Ubuntu, Rocky Linux, and others, are supported by C4A instances. It recently introduced support for the transfer of Arm-based instances in the Migrate to Virtual Machines service in preview, and Arm-compatible software and solutions are available on the Google Cloud Marketplace.
Additionally, C4A VMs provide the storage and connection performance that your business requires:
- High-Bandwidth Networking: To accommodate high-traffic applications, Tier_1 networking can offer up to 100 Gbps of bandwidth in addition to the typical 50 Gbps.
- With a throughput of up to 5 GB/s and 350k IOPS, Google Cloud’s latest iteration of balanced and extreme hyperdisk storage provides scalable, high-performance storage.
Find out more
C4A instances are now widely accessible through Committed Use Discounts (CUDs) with one- and three-year durations, reservations, Spot VMs, and FlexCUDs. As of right now, C4A virtual machines are accessible in the following regions: asia-southeast1 (Singapore), eu-west1 (Belgium), eu-west4 (Netherlands), eu-west3 (Frankfurt), us-central1 (Iowa), us-east4 (Virginia), and us-east1 (SC).
Instances powered by Axion
| Google Axion Processor | Workloads | Shapes |
|---|---|---|
| C4A | Web and app servers (high traffic)Ad serversGame serversData analyticsDatabases (any size)In-memory cachesMedia streaming and transcodingCPU-based AI/MLNetwork appliances | Up to 72 vCPUs, 576 gb RAM, and 100 gbps networking. Configurations:Standard: 1:4 vCPU to memoryHigh memory: 1:8 vCPU to memoryHigh CPU: 1:2 vCPU to memory |
