Shared CPU Compute Instances are our most affordable virtual machines that offer a significant price-to-performance ratio. They provide a well balanced set of resources that are ideal for a wide range of applications. While most of our other Compute Instance types are equipped with dedicated CPUs, shared Compute Instances are not. This means that CPU resources are shared with other Compute Instances and a small amount of resource contention is possible.

Shared plans are ideal for development servers, staging servers, low traffic websites, personal blogs, and production applications that may not be affected by resource contention.

Recommended workloads

Shared CPU Compute Instances are suitable for general workloads that value cost over maximum performance:

• Production applications with low to medium CPU requirements and are not affected by resource contention
• Applications that require a balanced set of resources
• Medium to low traffic websites, such as for marketing content and blogs
• Forums
• Development and staging servers
• Low traffic databases
• Worker nodes within a container orchestration cluster

Availability

Shared CPU Compute Instances are available across all core compute regions, but are not available in distributed compute regions.

Plans and pricing

Pricing starts at $5 for a Shared CPU Compute Instance with 1 vCPU core, 1 GB of memory, and 25 GB of SSD storage. Pricing may vary by region. Review the pricing page for additional plans and their associated costs. Review the Plans page to learn more about other Compute Instance types.