Abstract: Methods, systems, and apparatus, including computer programs encoded on a computer storage medium, for service bridges. In one aspect, a method includes a host operating system performs operations comprising: receiving, using one or more service bridges that execute in the host operating system, a plurality of requests from the one or more virtual machines, wherein each service bridge is associated with a different virtual machine of the one or more virtual machines, and wherein each request is a request to interface with one or more external services; modifying, using a respective service bridge, each request to be processed by the one or more external services; and providing each modified request from the respective service bridge to the one or more external services, where the respective service bridge communicates with the one or more external services over a network.

Abstract: Methods, systems, and apparatus, including computer programs encoded on computer storage media, for accessing services from a virtual machine. One of the methods includes receiving requests for long-term security tokens from a host machine, each request comprising authentication information for a respective service account. The method include providing long-term security tokens to the host machine, wherein the long-term security tokens can be used to generate short-term security tokens for a virtual machine executing on the host machine. The method also includes generating by a process executing in a host operating system of the host machines a short-term security token based on a long-term security token of the long-term security tokens for use by a virtual machine executing on the host machine to access one of the respective service accounts, wherein the short-term security token is useable for a pre-determined amount of time.

Abstract: Methods, systems, and apparatus, including computer programs encoded on a computer storage medium, for exposing metadata to a virtual machine. In one aspect, a method includes executing a virtual machine on a host operating system. A synthetic file system is mounted on the virtual machine to expose the synthetic file system to a plurality of guest applications executing on the virtual machine. The synthetic file system is configured to provide a plurality of system calls to the guest applications including at least a read operation or a write operation for reading from or writing to external metadata stored outside the virtual machine.

Abstract: Methods, systems, and apparatus, including computer programs encoded on computer storage media, for implementing a global computing interface. One of the methods includes maintaining a global database of virtual machine configuration information, the database including information on cloud computing resources in each of a plurality of regions, wherein each region of the plurality of regions includes one or more datacenters. A virtual machine image is received in a first region. The global database is updated with configuration information about the received virtual machine image that is stored in the first region. A request is received to start one or more virtual machines from the virtual machine image in a second different region, and the virtual machine image is transmitted from the first region to the second region and one or more virtual machines are started from the virtual machine image in a datacenter of the second different region.

Abstract: Methods, systems, and apparatus, including computer programs encoded on a computer storage medium, for implementing virtual network pairs between virtual machines and other devices. In one aspect, a method includes receiving a plurality of outgoing packets from one or more source virtual machines executing on the data processing apparatus, each source virtual machine being a hardware virtualization of the data processing apparatus and each packet destined for a destination virtual machine; establishing a plurality of virtual network pairs, one for each unique pair of source and destination virtual machines, wherein establishing the plurality of virtual network pairs comprises obtaining, from an external data processing apparatus, a different network address for each destination virtual machine; encapsulating each outgoing packet in a message; and sending each message to the destination virtual machine for the respective packet by sending the message to the respective network destination address.

Abstract: Methods, systems, and apparatus, including computer programs encoded on a computer storage medium, relating to managing resources. In one aspect, a method includes the actions of receiving configuration information, the configuration information specifying a plurality of parameter values including values for a size and input/output performance parameters, where the size and performance parameters are independently specified by a user; determining one or more physical resources that satisfy the received configuration information; and generating one or more virtual disk instances having the specified size and performance parameters.

Abstract: The management of computational resources of coprocessors to facilitate efficient execution of multiple applications in a multitasking environment is accomplished by enabling multiple threads of execution to compose command buffers in parallel, submitting those command buffers for scheduling and dispatch by the operating system, and fielding interrupts that notify of completion of command buffers, the system enables multiple applications to efficiently share the computational resources available in the system.

Abstract: Systems and methods are provided for managing the computational resources of coprocessor(s), such as graphics processor(s), in a computing system. The systems and methods illustrate management of computational resources of coprocessors to facilitate efficient execution of multiple applications in a multitasking environment. By enabling multiple threads of execution to compose command buffers in parallel, submitting those command buffers for scheduling and dispatch by the operating system, and fielding interrupts that notify of completion of command buffers, the system enables multiple applications to efficiently share the computational resources available in the system.