Introducing Preemptible VMs • Hacker News Board

Re: Introducing Preemptible VMs

#21

Post by branola » Mon, May 18, 2015, 2:11 PM UTC

Any developer who was burned by App Engine pricing in the past is likely to take the lure of a "70% off" discount with a grain of salt because of the much higher cost of incorrectly relying on Google's pricing pledges.

In case anyone forgets, the pricing changes on Google App Engine caused many developers to abandon apps they had developed on the platform because of hundreds of percent increases in pricing:

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/google-appengine/rSh...

Re: Introducing Preemptible VMs

#22

Post by 4k » Mon, May 18, 2015, 2:17 PM UTC

I might be missing something important here. But according to their pricing page[1], a preemtible VM with 30GB memory costs $86.4 a month.

Why would someone go for this when cheap dedicated host providers like hetzner etc offer powerful dedicated servers with 64GB memory and multicore server grade CPUs? The comparison only gets worse taking into account that Google's offering is preemptible and can shutdown and come up as they wish.

[1]: https://cloud.google.com/compute/#pricing (0.12x24x30)

Re: Introducing Preemptible VMs

#23

Post by boulos » Mon, May 18, 2015, 2:22 PM UTC

jxf wrote: post #17

This 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 Examples of workloads that might look like this: * geocoding large batches of addresses * map-reducing large event streams * content scraping/crawling Notice that you don't nee…

Yeah, I added it to bdutil since it was clearly useful and yet well understood that it would do the right thing. I'd love to see more cluster and machine management tools deal with "machines can come and go".

The guys on the go team are using it for their buildbots (http://build.golang.org) which was already prepared for the box to die.

Re: Introducing Preemptible VMs

#24

Post by CydeWeys » Mon, May 18, 2015, 2:26 PM UTC

4k wrote: post #22

I might be missing something important here. But according to their pricing page[1], a preemtible VM with 30GB memory costs $86.4 a month. Why would someone go for this when cheap dedicated host providers like hetzner etc offer powerful dedicated servers with 64GB memory and multicore server grade CPUs? The comparison only gets worse taking into account that Google's offering is preemptible and can shutdown and come…

It's about scaling. Google's offering is a cloud service and Hetzner's is not. You're always paying the same amount per month with Hetzner, whereas you'd only pay that much with Google if you have consistent full utilization (which seems rather unlikely; most workloads do not look like this). Secondly, if you create something that becomes popular, you can scale it up on GCE a lot more easily than you can with a dedicated hosting provider.

Re: Introducing Preemptible VMs

#25

Post by rwmj » Mon, May 18, 2015, 2:26 PM UTC

4k wrote: post #22

I might be missing something important here. But according to their pricing page[1], a preemtible VM with 30GB memory costs $86.4 a month. Why would someone go for this when cheap dedicated host providers like hetzner etc offer powerful dedicated servers with 64GB memory and multicore server grade CPUs? The comparison only gets worse taking into account that Google's offering is preemptible and can shutdown and come…

It's like asking why do people use Serviced Offices which are usually 10x the price of a monthly rented office. Answers: because they only need the office / VM for a few hours. Because they can immediately get an office / VM of any size they need. Because they can walk away from the office / VM when they don't need it any longer. It's certainly not for everyone, but Regus seem to be doing ok.

Re: Introducing Preemptible VMs

#26

Post by boulos » Mon, May 18, 2015, 2:27 PM UTC

vosper wrote: post #11

@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]. [1] https://cloud.google.com/pricing/#compute-engine [2] https://cloud.google.com/compute/pricing

Yeah, as part of our larger pricing announcement we're making sure people go to /pricing so they get a bigger picture before diving straight to the table ;)

[Edit: Point taken though]

Re: Introducing Preemptible VMs

#27

Post by CydeWeys » Mon, May 18, 2015, 2:28 PM UTC

andybak wrote: post #15

Any 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.

By "conventional web stuff", do you mean serving a website or similar? Yeah, I don't think it makes sense to host a website on a service that is preemptible. You need your webserver available to respond to requests 24/7. It can't just randomly go down. Pre-emptible instances are more suited for batch processing and big data computation runs.

Re: Introducing Preemptible VMs

#28

Post by noelwelsh » Mon, May 18, 2015, 2:29 PM UTC

4k wrote: post #22

I might be missing something important here. But according to their pricing page[1], a preemtible VM with 30GB memory costs $86.4 a month. Why would someone go for this when cheap dedicated host providers like hetzner etc offer powerful dedicated servers with 64GB memory and multicore server grade CPUs? The comparison only gets worse taking into account that Google's offering is preemptible and can shutdown and come…

APIs, instant access, massive scale, no setup fees, and value-added services like DBs and message queues are all reasons to use a cloud provider.

Re: Introducing Preemptible VMs

#29

Post by spankalee » Mon, May 18, 2015, 2:38 PM UTC

branola wrote: post #21

Any developer who was burned by App Engine pricing in the past is likely to take the lure of a "70% off" discount with a grain of salt because of the much higher cost of incorrectly relying on Google's pricing pledges. In case anyone forgets, the pricing changes on Google App Engine caused many developers to abandon apps they had developed on the platform because of hundreds of percent increases in pricing: https://g…

App Engine was in preview when its price changed.

Re: Introducing Preemptible VMs

#30

Post by tw04 » Mon, May 18, 2015, 2:38 PM UTC

So... this is essentially first come, first served based on their description. And they say the preemptibles come from a smaller pool of resources. Seems odd to me they wouldn't have a number somewhere of how many are available and how many are in use given that it's a finite resource.

Tough to build a business model around a resource you can't even determine the availability of.