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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

#111
post #106
post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just clone AWS down to the API endpoints?

They already replicated the S3 API as an alternative to the Google Cloud Storage API: https://cloud.google.com/storage/docs/migrating#migration-si...

I get the impression that's pretty common, Cloudflare's new product is S3 compatible too.

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

#113
post #104
post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No shade, but this is a very AWS specific view of cloud. Every cloud has a different resource allocation philosophy, not all the assumptions are the same.

Yeah, GCP spot instances don't vary in price like AWS ("The price adjustments will occur at most once a month").

There is no longer bidding for spot prices on AWS. They moved to model where pay the fixed spot price which isn't based on capacity.

https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/compute/new-amazon-ec2-spot-pri...

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

#114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>“requiredDuringSchedulingIgnoredDuringExecution” .. wow, what an epic length for a configuration option Looks like Java culture is alive, well and spreading.

Seems Kubernetes-y: https://kubernetes.io/docs/concepts/scheduling-eviction/assi...

>Seems Kubernetes-y:

Two guesses as to where the folks who implemented Kubernetes hail from (as in: which programming language)

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

#115
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Not a rename. See my comment.

These changes are so minor that they don't count as a new product IMO.

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

#116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems Kubernetes-y: https://kubernetes.io/docs/concepts/scheduling-eviction/assi...

>Seems Kubernetes-y: Two guesses as to where the folks who implemented Kubernetes hail from (as in: which programming language)

> Two guesses as to where the folks who implemented Kubernetes hail from (as in: which programming language

Go, obviously, though from their rationale article they “love” C/C++, Java, and Python, too.

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

#117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also what is the granularity? Right now on AWS you have to pay for the full hour even if you use it for 5 minutes. A per minute granularity can make Google's offering more enticing for a lot of users.

On AWS you only pay for full hours if you're using RHEL or Suse. Any other Linux distro or Windows pay by seconds: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/spot-int... On GCP seems like you pay per seconds, but if you use a Premium OS and GCP stops your instance, you would pay for the premium OS pricing anyway: https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/instances/spot#spot-wi...

Thank you this is great news for me. I always assumed it was by the hour, or maybe it was and they changed it and I missed the announcement. Regardless this is great news for me!

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

#118
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Yes, but this is common for "cloud native" applications. Web servers are ideally stateless "cattle", not "pets". Code is pulled down via CI/CD pipelines or via container images. State is in databases or blobs. Logs stream to some sort of analytics system. Similarly, Kubernetes works well with spot VMs. You can have Spot and Regular node pools in one cluster, and then your workloads can happily spread out to the extra…

It's really easy to "beat" the chaos monkey with this kind of design. You can destroy any VMs in our infra with reckless abandon and everything will be fine. If you destroy all the VMs of particular service obviously it will affect availability but it will still recover by itself in about 60 seconds.

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

#119
post #68
post #63

From https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/instances/preemptible : "Spot VMs (Preview) are the latest version of preemptible VM instances. Preemptible VMs continue to be supported for new and existing VMs, and preemptible VMs now use the same pricing model as Spot VMs . However, Spot VMs provide new features that are not supported for preemptible VMs. For example, preemptible VMs can only run for up to 24 hours at a…

Looking through our history, it looks like us-east-1 preëmptible VMs were a flat 30% the cost of non-preëmptible VMs. So in the worst-case scenario, we'll be paying 10% more for the same product, but also potentially saving up to 19% in periods where GCP has excess capacity.

What kind of instance was that? For A100 servers we got something like 5x price difference.

The doc says: > Preemptible VM instances are available at much lower price—a 60-91% discount—compared to the price of standard VMs.

Maybe you're using huge disks, those don't get discounts on preemptible instances from what I remember.

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

#120
post #28
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well except that on peak hours their infrastructure would disappear :) 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…

Apparently some just gamble that by having some instances of every time, they won't all go down: "However, your cloud provider can pull these virtual machines out from under you at any time without notice (because someone else is willing to pay more). So how do you lower the probability of losing all of your instances to nearly zero? Cloud providers generally need to have a large buffer of capacity and they have many…

Yes absolutely. On AWS you can use spot instance fleets to implement this strategy https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/how-spot...
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