A year and a half after its debut, Google Compute Engine(Opens in a new window) is now generally available.

Google’s answer to cloud computing, the infrastructure-as-service product was introduced at its June 2012 I/O developer conference, with the promise of time-saving measures and consistent performance at a massive scale.

Now, it’s more broadly available, “offering virtual machines that are performant, scalable, reliable, and offer industry-leading security features like encryption of data at rest,” Ari Balogh, Google Cloud Platform vice president, said in a blog post(Opens in a new window).

Google Compute Engine includes 24/7 support and a monthly uptime percentage of at least 99.95 percent. If Google fails to meet that percentage, customers are eligible for financial credits.

During a preview period, Google was able to identify and fix a number of problems. The search giant has since expanded its operating system support, expanding from Linux distributors Debian and Centos to all out-of-the-box Linux distributions, as well as the kernel or software of your choosing.

Meanwhile, “developers have asked for instances with even greater computational power and memory for applications that range from silicon simulation to running high-scale NoSQL databases,” Balogh wrote. “To serve their needs, we’re launching three new instance types in Limited Preview with up to 16 cores and 104 gigabytes of RAM. They are available in the familiar standard, high-memory and high-CPU shapes.”

The search engine has also implemented transparent maintenance, which will “perform proactive maintenance while your virtual machines keep running.”

“At Google, we have found that regular maintenance of hardware and software infrastructure is critical to operating with a high level of reliability, security, and performance,” Balogh wrote.

Users now receive all of the benefits of regular updates and proactive maintenance, but without the drag of usual downtime and reboots. In the event of a failure, the system will automatically restart VMs within minutes — a feature already available to U.S. users, and expected to roll out elsewhere in the coming months.

Perhaps the most enticing feature, though, is the price cut. Google has lowered the cost of Persistent Disk by 60 percent per gigabyte, and dropped prices on its most popular standard Compute Engine instances by 10 percent in all regions.

The Google Compute Engine includes integration from a number of partners, including SaltStack, Wowza, Rightscale, Qubole, Red Hat, SUSE, and Scalr. Balogh also boasted about customers like Snapchat, Cooladata, Mendelics, Evite, and Wix, which have built complex systems on Compute Engine.

The cloud computing system takes aim at similar products, like Microsoft’s Azure and Amazon EC2.