Introducing Preemptible VMs

#1

Post by boulos » Mon, May 18, 2015, 12:58 PM UTC

Introducing Preemptible VMs
googlecloudplatform.blogspot.com

Re: Introducing Preemptible VMs

#2

Post by gnur » Mon, May 18, 2015, 1:28 PM UTC

I wonder how big the chance is that the machine is turned off in the first hour.

I use Google Compute for some personal project and the typical run time for a VM is about 10 - 20 minutes. If the vm has 90% chance to survive the first hour, it could be worth the trouble to make my process more fault tolerable.

Re: Introducing Preemptible VMs

#3

Post by boulos » Mon, May 18, 2015, 1:33 PM UTC

gnur wrote: post #2

I wonder how big the chance is that the machine is turned off in the first hour. I use Google Compute for some personal project and the typical run time for a VM is about 10 - 20 minutes. If the vm has 90% chance to survive the first hour, it could be worth the trouble to make my process more fault tolerable.

We're not ready to put hard numbers on it. As our docs (https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/instances/preemptible) say:

The probability that Compute Engine will terminate a preemptible instance for a system event is generally low, but may vary from day to day and from zone to zone depending on current conditions.

Give it a shot in us-central1-a and let us know how it goes!

[Edit to undo my quote text (it wrapped poorly)]

Re: Introducing Preemptible VMs

#4

Post by ikeboy » Mon, May 18, 2015, 1:33 PM UTC

How does their pricing compare to ec2 spot instances?

Re: Introducing Preemptible VMs

#5

Post by [deleted] » Mon, May 18, 2015, 1:37 PM UTC

[deleted]

Re: Introducing Preemptible VMs

#6

Post by TallGuyShort » Mon, May 18, 2015, 1:38 PM UTC

[deleted] wrote: post #5

[deleted]

It isn't fundamentally different from EC2 spot instances.

Re: Introducing Preemptible VMs

#7

Post by raverbashing » Mon, May 18, 2015, 1:40 PM UTC

TallGuyShort wrote: post #6

[deleted] wrote: post #5

[deleted]

It isn't fundamentally different from EC2 spot instances.

Beyond the fixed price, no?

Also, do you get the 30s grace period on spot instance shutdown?

Re: Introducing Preemptible VMs

#8

Post by boulos » Mon, May 18, 2015, 1:40 PM UTC

[deleted] wrote: post #5

[deleted]

Preemptible VMs definitely aren't for everything. We just lowered our pricing on regular VMs (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9564136) as well, so if your workload isn't fault tolerant I'm sure our full price hotel is just fine ;).

Re: Introducing Preemptible VMs

#9

Post by vosper » Mon, May 18, 2015, 1:41 PM UTC

[deleted] wrote: post #5

[deleted]

If you're running on a Preemptible VM and find that preemption events are "like getting ejected from a hotel at 3AM" then you've either selected the wrong VM type or made a poor choice in designing your app.

Re: Introducing Preemptible VMs

#10

Post by acdha » Mon, May 18, 2015, 1:43 PM UTC

[deleted] wrote: post #5

[deleted]

Think about these for things like resumable task queue workers: if you're doing something like processing images, slow text analysis, crawling web pages, etc. this is a great way to save money as long as your overall management system has a way to restart tasks which were in-progress when the VM was shut down.