Google has joined Microsoft and Rackspace on the quest to erode Amazon’s cloud dominance with the launch of its long anticipated platform-as-a-service solution. Originally announced at the company’s sixth annual I/O conference in June 2012, Google Compute Engine features competitive pricing, new capabilities, and a 99.95 percent SLA.

Cloud analytics provider RightScale, a Google partner and one of the first companies to adopt GCE, managed to scale a tier-3 app to 42 servers with 200,000 concurrent users back in June, when the service still in preview. The search giant boasts that Compute Engine can now sustain up to one million requests per second, one of several improvements announced with the general availability release of the platform.

In addition to more horsepower, GCE gives users the freedom to run any Linux flavor and software, including commercial distributions from Red Hat and SUSE as well as the Docker container engine, among others. Enterprises also benefit from the ability to install the secure SELinux kernel module, fast VM restarts, and live migration that ensures server maintenance doesn’t impact their workloads. Another major selling point is per-minute pricing, which can drive substantial cost savings for organizations with resource-intensive applications that scale up and down on a regular basis. To top it off, Google cut prices across-the-board and added a new 16-core instance option.

Michael Crandell, the CEO of RightScale, highlighted that the changes helped Google steal some attention from AWS.

“RightScale has supported Google Cloud Platform from the beginning. Our enterprise customers have told us the GA of Google Cloud Platform and Compute Engine is a very important milestone. Many of our customers believe Google has the scale and performance to be an important piece of an enterprise multi-cloud portfolio.”