Google Cloud Engine is similar to Amazon AWS-EC2; Google Cloud Storage
is similar to Amazon-S3. As hypervisor, EC2 uses Xen; GCE uses KVM. Both
uses REST for the APIs.
My test instance is called "i1" and the
instance type is n1-standard-1 (1 vCPU, 3.75 GB RAM, 0.114 USD/hour if
hosted in the Europe region which has two zones). I run a CentOS 6.5
image provided by Google.