Google has announced general availability of its Compute Engine IaaS platform, with the search giant aiming to play alongside the likes of Amazon and Microsoft in infrastructure as a service.

The service was available to developers and as a preview for companies to sign up back in May. Now, it’s been fully launched – and the Mountain View giant hasn’t set the bar too high with a 99.95% SLA.

CloudTech readers will know full well the issues with claiming a 100% service agreement – so this, alongside 24/7 support, comes as refreshing news. Amazon’s EC2 and S3 clouds come in at 99.95% and 99.9% respectively.

Underpinning this step to avoid fallover, Google Compute Engine can be set up so that instances can be automatically restarted in the event of hardware failures or maintenance, meaning virtual machines can be up and running again within minutes.

Google …