Google recently provide the free tier on their Google Cloud Platform (GCP). The free tier will be free forever (but what Google offered are subjected to changes).

Also included in the free tier is $300 credit for 12 months (I think this was 2 months – good !)

I applied, created Google Compute Engine (GCE) f1-micro instance, ran the same benchmarks as I did on Vultr, DO, and Scaleway.

The best results I got from the instance:

dd write bs=4k count=10k  100k  1M
                    1500  39.6  37.5 MB/s

dd read bs=4k 
63.1 MB/s

sysbench --test=cpu --cpu-max-prime=10000 run
11.7567 sec.

stress-ng --cpu 1 --cpu-method all -t 30 
156.75 ops/sec

BUT …

The results were not consistent.  I ran the dd write 5 more times, the results varied from 211 MB/s to 1.5 GB/s. sysbench results varied from 11 to 13 sec. stress-ng varied between 50 – 150 ops/sec.

I think this is because almost all the resources for free tier (CPU, disk, network) are shared among others.

It’s free, though.