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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

#41

Post by kubanczyk »

virgilp wrote: post #33
hiyer wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess you haven't worked with Hadoop. Here's an example of what configuration option names in it can look like: dfs.datanode.available-space-volume-choosing-policy.balanced-space-preference-fraction

Is length really a problem? I definitely prefer this over, eg. dfs.datanode.asvcp.bspf

Naming things is hard. There are a lot of users of Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol and users of American Standard Code for Information Interchange who disagree with you. It's more of a social endeavor than anything else.

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

#42

Post by pushrax »

titzer wrote: post #16
wmf wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Nevertheless, doesn't that force you to divide your work up into units somehow and manage external storage to track what/how much is done?

The reality at scale is that all cloud VMs are preemptible and unreliable. You can pay more to increase the probability of uptime but inevitably have to recover from failure sometimes.

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

#43

Post by [deleted] »

teraflop wrote: post #18
titzer wrote: 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)?

That's correct: spot instances are ideal for batch workloads with relatively little persistent state. If your deadline for completing a unit of work isn't extremely short, and you're already distributing jobs across a pool of worker nodes, it's relatively straightforward to dynamically start spot instances if they're available, and on-demand instances otherwise. Technically, you're gambling a bit because whenever a s…

[deleted]

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

#44

Post by chromakode »

cma wrote: post #25
shock-value wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Tha sounds like a horrific dev environment, if randomly shut down with 30 seconds notice.

One thing this helps with is keeping development environments up to date. When there's a large spread between instance lifetimes, it becomes more difficult to deploy updates and changes to developer infrastructure. This can grow into an org problem where shipping dev infra changes blocks on disrupting dev workflows.

You can approach this by continuously deploying upgrades to the dev fleet, but it's simpler to simply set a lifetime bound (with an opt-out for special circumstances).

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

#45

Post by mike_d »

aetherspawn wrote: post #30

“requiredDuringSchedulingIgnoredDuringExecution” .. wow, what an epic length for a configuration option!

Let me introduce you to CNLabelContactRelationYoungerCousinMothersSiblingsDaughterOrFathersSistersDaughter

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/contacts/cnlabelco...

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

#46

Post by jayd16 »

snewman wrote: post #13
zamalek wrote: post #12

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.

No guarantee but still very likely there are instances available.

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

#47

Post by Sanguinaire »

It's weird how the 3 major clouds have taken different paths to what must be an almost identical resource allocation problem.

AWS has had this kind of spot instance for years, but with a 2 minute grace period rather than the 30 seconds GCP is offering. Azure and GCP both originally went with the 24-hour cutoff (which can easily be replicated on a regular spot instance if needed), but now GCP are backing off on that restriction.

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

#49

Post by virgilp »

kubanczyk wrote: post #41
virgilp wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is length really a problem? I definitely prefer this over, eg. dfs.datanode.asvcp.bspf

Naming things is hard. There are a lot of users of Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol and users of American Standard Code for Information Interchange who disagree with you. It's more of a social endeavor than anything else.

Nice.

I think this gives a hint though - when something is very-frequently-used, people need a short name so that it doesn't stand in the way of the discussion; and due to frequency, the fact that it's an acronym doesn't matter: I bet there are more people know what ASCII is than there are people who know what the acronym stands for.

For configuration, though? asvcp.bspf is never going to be frequently used by anybody. That's generally the point of configuration, for the vast majority of cases, you touch it at most once. So I argue you want long names.

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

#50

Post by ggm »

Is this a sign they have surplus pre-emptible capacity on their architecture for non-premptible VMs, and so worrying, if you think they have enough customers to sustain the model?

(google could run negative forever: the point is, some VP won't want to, and the KPI will morph to "kill it")

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