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Sole-tenant nodes provide dedicated physical servers in Google Cloud's data centres where only your VMs run. Unlike standard Compute Engine VMs that share physical hosts with other customers (multi-tenancy), sole-tenant nodes ensure that your workloads are physically isolated from other tenants.
While multi-tenancy is the norm in public cloud computing and is secure by design (Google's custom hypervisor provides strong isolation), some organisations have requirements that mandate physical isolation:
Some industry regulations and compliance frameworks require workloads to run on dedicated hardware:
| Requirement | Example |
|---|---|
| HIPAA | Healthcare data that must not share physical hosts |
| PCI DSS | Payment card data requiring physical isolation |
| Government | Classified or sensitive workloads with strict tenancy rules |
| Financial services | Trading systems requiring dedicated performance |
Many enterprise software licences (Oracle, SQL Server, Windows Server) have per-core or per-socket licensing terms that require you to know the exact physical hardware your VMs run on. Sole-tenant nodes provide the visibility needed to comply with Bring Your Own Licence (BYOL) agreements.
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