@boulos, since it looks like you're involved with this: The link to the product pricing [1] goes to a generic landing page for Google services, which is a little confusing. I think you should link directly to the instance pricing [2].
Introducing Preemptible VMs
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Re: Introducing Preemptible VMs
#12Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
As of January, yes:
https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-ec2-spot-instance-termi...
Re: Introducing Preemptible VMs
#13Re: Introducing Preemptible VMs
#14How does their pricing compare to ec2 spot instances?
You can find a list of our prices here: https://cloud.google.com/compute/#pricing . Preemptible VMs have flat per-machine type pricing compared to EC2's bidding-based pricing. For example, a Preemptible n1-standard-1 is 1.5 cents per hour in the US and a preemptible n1-standard-4 is 6.0 cents per hour.
Re: Introducing Preemptible VMs
#15Any reason you couldn't use these for conventional web stuff? 30 seconds could easily be long enough to bring up another instance and sync data if needed.
Re: Introducing Preemptible VMs
#16How does their pricing compare to ec2 spot instances?
Well, spot varies. Sometimes it's low, but the price varies based on demand. Using prices as of right now for example, Currently in California, c3.8xl instances are quite popular, running $1.68 an hour on an instance that's normally 1.912 an hour, roughly a 13% discount. 70% strikes me as better than 13%, especially when it's predictable. (and 70% below an already substantially lower hourly price...)
[1] http://storage.googleapis.com/pricingcomparator.appspot.com/...
[2] http://storage.googleapis.com/pricingcomparator.appspot.com/...
disclaimer: I work at Google on Google Cloud Platform
Re: Introducing Preemptible VMs
#17This is a great announcement. Preemptible VMs are a great strategy if:
* you don't care too much about when a workload finishes
* it can be chunked into small units of interruptible work
* the cost of resuming interrupted work is zero or small
* geocoding large batches of addresses
* map-reducing large event streams
* content scraping/crawling
I think that's a great way to do it, though I wish it was generalized for all kinds of clusters, not just for Hadoop ones.
Re: Introducing Preemptible VMs
#18How does their pricing compare to ec2 spot instances?
The fundamental difference seems to be that Google's prices are fixed, whereas AWS uses a "market" model, which frequently sees crazy prices (well over the on-demand price) especially in us-east-1.
I say "market" because no-one really knows how the spot market place actually works. We've had machines run for weeks, and other times the prices fluctuate in bizarre ways and we can't get out preferred instance types for hours or (in the worst case) days. There's an interesting analysis here: http://santtu.iki.fi/2014/03/20/ec2-spot-market/
Re: Introducing Preemptible VMs
#19Nice! This ties in with the discussion yesterday on HN about data center utilization. Good for saving money and the end result must be lower global energy use if this also catches on with other providers (AWS already offers something similar).
When I worked at Google in 2013 part of my job was running very large calculations that were often pre-empted. I usually ran at the lowest priority and was in effect using spare capacity. No hassles, assuming that getting runs completed was not too time sensitive.
Re: Introducing Preemptible VMs
#20How does their pricing compare to ec2 spot instances?
Well, spot varies. Sometimes it's low, but the price varies based on demand. Using prices as of right now for example, Currently in California, c3.8xl instances are quite popular, running $1.68 an hour on an instance that's normally 1.912 an hour, roughly a 13% discount. 70% strikes me as better than 13%, especially when it's predictable. (and 70% below an already substantially lower hourly price...) [1] http://stora…
The long-run price for a c3.8xlarge in California is somewhere between $0.40 and $0.50, though you're correct that right now they're $1.68.
California tends to be more expensive than other AWS regions, though (I can't remember the reason - perhaps just availability?). If you're in us-east-1 the price sticks around $0.20 per hour, and eu-west-1 is rock-solid at $0.32 per hour.
If you have work that can be done on spots it can be a good idea to make it region-agnostic so that you can take advantage of better prices for different instances in different regions.