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GCP releases Spot VMs, the next generation of Pre-emptible VMs

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Re: GCP releases Spot VMs, the next generation of Pre-emptible VMs

#6
post #3

I don’t see this in the article, but is there any reason why they’d introduce a new VM type rather than just removing the 24hour limit of preemptible VMs?

It's probably a niche use case, but there is some utility to having a guaranteed daily shutoff. For example, you might spin up an instance as an on-demand remote dev environment, and the 24 hour cutoff ensures it doesn't accidentally get left on (over a weekend, for example).

This would be easy to work around, but nonetheless could lead to unexpectedly high charges if you were relying on this behavior only to have it silently change.

Re: GCP releases Spot VMs, the next generation of Pre-emptible VMs

#7
I have trouble thinking of a use case that fits this VM type. Is it for batch processing tasks that don't have tight deadlines? The lack of any real guarantees makes it hard to price, as you have no idea what you're actually paying for. Would it make sense to have a model that includes deadlines in its pricing (like give this process 2.5 hours of CPU and 4GB of RAM to complete this task by...next Tuesday)?

Re: GCP releases Spot VMs, the next generation of Pre-emptible VMs

#8

It appears that GCP is rather late to the party here. I believe AWS has had spot instances for a very long time (more than 5 years at least) Is my understanding correct? and if so any insights on why it took so long

GCP has had "preemptible" VMs for years; the only news is that they renamed them to "spot" to match AWS. I wonder if they were losing checkboxes over the naming.

Re: GCP releases Spot VMs, the next generation of Pre-emptible VMs

#9

It appears that GCP is rather late to the party here. I believe AWS has had spot instances for a very long time (more than 5 years at least) Is my understanding correct? and if so any insights on why it took so long

GCP has had Preemptible VMs, which WILL terminate after 24 hours if it lasted that long. Spot VMs removes this 24h limit.

Re: GCP releases Spot VMs, the next generation of Pre-emptible VMs

#10
post #7

I have trouble thinking of a use case that fits this VM type. Is it for batch processing tasks that don't have tight deadlines? The lack of any real guarantees makes it hard to price, as you have no idea what you're actually paying for. Would it make sense to have a model that includes deadlines in its pricing (like give this process 2.5 hours of CPU and 4GB of RAM to complete this task by...next Tuesday)?

You might be misunderstanding how spot works. The VM either runs at full speed or not at all so you know what you're getting.
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