11–20 of 129 posts
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.
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)?
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)?
If your code can survive chaos monkey, it can trivially weather this. Netflix, as one example, could run their entire infrastructure on these VMs.
Any word on pricing?
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)?
If your code can survive chaos monkey, it can trivially weather this. Netflix, as one example, could run their entire infrastructure on these VMs.
You always need some traditional instances to serve things that need to be available at all time, like your website. Now you could run things using spot instances and switch to traditional during peak hours but that requires confidence that enough capacity is going to be available when you need it (which is going to be at the same time as everyone else, so it's always a bet :))
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.
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)?
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)?
Technically, you're gambling a bit because whenever a spot instance is terminated, you probably need to spend a bit extra to redo whatever work it was in the middle of. But spot instances have such a huge discount that it's almost always worth taking that risk, as long as you don't mind the extra management complexity.
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)?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If your code can survive chaos monkey, it can trivially weather this. Netflix, as one example, could run their entire infrastructure on these VMs.
Except that (presumably) there is no guarantee that any spot instances are available. You could wind up in a state where you have no instances running. No user-facing production service can tolerate that.