Cloud Spanner is the only enterprise-grade, globally-distributed, and strongly-consistent database service built for the cloud, specifically to combine the benefits of relational database structure with non-relational horizontal scale. It is a unique database that combines transactions, SQL queries, and relational structure with the scalability that you typically associate with non-relational or NoSQL databases.

Compute Engine is a customizable compute service that lets you create and run virtual machines on Google’s infrastructure. You can create a Virtual Machine (VM) that fits your needs. Predefined machine types are pre-built and ready-to-go configurations of VMs with specific amounts of vCPU and memory to start running apps quickly. With Custom Machine Types, you can create virtual machines with the optimal amount of CPU and memory for your workloads. This allows you to tailor your infrastructure to your workload. If requirements change, using the stop/start feature you can move your workload to a smaller or larger Custom Machine Type instance, or to a predefined configuration.