The decision to make Debian the default image type for Google Compute Engine was announced by the company on Thursday. As a consequence, Google’s stripped down Linux OS GCEL (Google Compute Engine Linux) is being deprecated in favor of Debian 6.0 and 7.0
“We are continually evaluating other operating systems that we can enable with Compute Engine,” Jimmy Kaplowitz, a Google site reliability engineer, wrote. “However, going forward, Debian will be the default image type for Compute Engine.”