In an evident attempt to enable the customers of its Gold Support package to benefit from the infrastructure as a service (IaaS) offering, Internet search biggie Google has revealed in a recent announcement that it is opening access to its Google Compute Engine cloud computing service.

The announcement by Google implies that Compute Engine, which was initially released in limited preview in June last year, is now being extended to Google's Gold Support package customers, who make a $400 monthly payment for the package.

According to the details shared by Google, a number of upgrades are also being made to Compute Engine - the price of which has been reduced by 4 percent - which chiefly challenges the Amazon Web Services'
(AWS) cloud computing service, as well as similar offerings from Rackspace, Savvis and some other companies.

The enhancements which the Compute Engine upgrades will bring along will include an improved Google Cloud Console that gives the organizations the ability to administer all their Google Cloud Platform services via one single unified interface.

Meanwhile, noting that the Compute Engine has received very `positive' response in the last nine months, Marc Cohen - a developer programs engineer on the Google App Engine blog - said in an April 4-dated post on Google Developers Blog that one of Google's key objectives in building Compute Engine is "to enable a new generation of applications with direct access to the capabilities of Google's vast computing infrastructure."