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Introducing Preemptible VMs

googlecloudplatform.blogspot.com

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Re: Introducing Preemptible VMs

#61

Post by Alupis »

discardorama wrote: post #59
Alupis wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> build entire businesses on an infrastructure that they later had to abandon. Frankly, if your business is built entirely around a single 3rd party provider, and you are totally incapable of pivoting cloud providers at short notice... well then you are "doing it wrong".

Like Netflix? They seem to be doing alright.

> Like Netflix? They seem to be doing alright.

Could you elaborate a little?

Netflix doesn't rely on a single provider for hardware, data centers, nor bandwidth. Sure they use EC2 for some things, but also have a great deal of hardware in data centers throughout the country, as well as custom hardware in ISP data centers, etc. I'd be shocked if there didn't use some of the other cloud provider offering too.

Netflix has no single point of failure.

Building your business around a single cloud provider creates a single point of failure.

Re: Introducing Preemptible VMs

#62

Post by Klathmon »

csense wrote: post #60
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…

I can immediately off the top off my head think of no less than four examples of useful services Google has discontinued or EOL'ed: Google Reader, Google Code, Google Wave, and XMPP support for Google Voice. So as well as potential future price hikes, you should be prepared for the possibility that this service might not be around for the long haul. Therefore you should skip using any Google-specific functionality, a…

I never got the "google shuts everything down" mentality that has become so prevalent.

I could easily beat those 4 with a multitude of examples from both Apple and Microsoft, that doesn't mean that any of them are untrustworthy, just that they evolve and continue to grow.

At least when google shuts down a service, they give a good amount of "heads up" to those using it, provide examples of trustworthy equivalent services from competitors, and ALWAYS provide an export function if it makes sense to have one.

Re: Introducing Preemptible VMs

#64

Post by pekk »

csense wrote: post #60
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…

I can immediately off the top off my head think of no less than four examples of useful services Google has discontinued or EOL'ed: Google Reader, Google Code, Google Wave, and XMPP support for Google Voice. So as well as potential future price hikes, you should be prepared for the possibility that this service might not be around for the long haul. Therefore you should skip using any Google-specific functionality, a…

You're right, though I wouldn't compare App Engine to things like Google Reader. When Google EOLs a highly-visible free service like Reader, it generates a lot of outrage, but consumers can find a replacement like Feedly at reasonably low cost.

The risk of writing apps on a platform like App Engine is far greater because people tend to spend years building software and a business tightly interwoven with the platform, only to be shut down by unpredictably massive rate hikes because you basically have to rewrite to get off the platform, not just the app itself but all your ops stuff too.

While it is possible to dig yourself into that hole using lots of Amazon services, Amazon doesn't require you to use platform-specific APIs, many of their services like EBS are very easy to replace, and Amazon's services have not been subjected to the same project-ending rate hikes. In practice, people move on and off EC2 all the time. So if you are going to trust a vendor, it's more reasonable to trust Amazon.

Re: Introducing Preemptible VMs

#65

Post by teraflop »

pekk wrote: post #64
csense wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can immediately off the top off my head think of no less than four examples of useful services Google has discontinued or EOL'ed: Google Reader, Google Code, Google Wave, and XMPP support for Google Voice. So as well as potential future price hikes, you should be prepared for the possibility that this service might not be around for the long haul. Therefore you should skip using any Google-specific functionality, a…

You're right, though I wouldn't compare App Engine to things like Google Reader. When Google EOLs a highly-visible free service like Reader, it generates a lot of outrage, but consumers can find a replacement like Feedly at reasonably low cost. The risk of writing apps on a platform like App Engine is far greater because people tend to spend years building software and a business tightly interwoven with the platform,…

This is Compute Engine, not App Engine.

App Engine has a very idiosyncratic API; GCE is more or less a direct clone of EC2.

Re: Introducing Preemptible VMs

#66

Post by teraflop »

vosper wrote: post #18
ikeboy wrote: post #4

How 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…

I don't really see a fundamental difference except that Google's offering is more opaque and less flexible. Instead of "your instance got killed, but you can restart it if you're willing to pay $x/hour", you get "your instance got killed, tough luck."

EC2's spot market fluctuates based on supply and demand, and there's no reason to think the same forces won't apply to GCE.

Re: Introducing Preemptible VMs

#67

Post by biot »

csense wrote: post #60
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…

I can immediately off the top off my head think of no less than four examples of useful services Google has discontinued or EOL'ed: Google Reader, Google Code, Google Wave, and XMPP support for Google Voice. So as well as potential future price hikes, you should be prepared for the possibility that this service might not be around for the long haul. Therefore you should skip using any Google-specific functionality, a…

Amazon has discontinued Flexible Payment Services, Amazon Webstore Services, and others. Presumably your warning to not rely on proprietary implementations is vendor-agnostic?

Re: Introducing Preemptible VMs

#68

Post by pekk »

spankalee wrote: post #55
branola wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was in "preview" for 3 years. During those 3 years no warning was given that the pricing changes were going to be of such a magnitude. As a result people had sufficient time and not enough warning to build entire businesses on an infrastructure that they later had to abandon. That's unforgivable.

The new pricing made it App Engine a sustainable business, because the old pricing model didn't actually account for costs and encouraged some very wasteful practices. The only other option to actually charging enough to cover costs would be to shut the service down. I'm sure more people would be more upset about that. App Engine has always been a unique PAAS because its APIs were designed to try to force developers…

It was Google, not the users, which set the old pricing model which people optimized for when they wrote their apps. Many apps which had to be shut down were already doing "right" things like caching, using task queues, and economizing on datastore accesses. It was Google, not the users, which designed App Engine so that porting away would essentially require a rewrite. It was not the users but Google which neglected certain popular language runtimes so that they were no longer cost-effective after the price hikes. And it was Google, not the users, which kept the issue opaque so there was no warning of how big the price hikes were going to be. If certain users found that they could sustain a double or triple bill, that doesn't mean it is the fault of the other users that they were forced to mothball their apps.

The users didn't decide any of these things, and are not to blame for them. What kind of service blames its customers for its own mistakes?

Google earned this distrust fair and square by suddenly forcing huge numbers of customers to rewrite all their existing code. Little price cuts don't matter: other services are already more cost-effective and are cutting their prices all the time, but even if there were price parity the risk attached to the lock-in just isn't worth it.

Re: Introducing Preemptible VMs

#69

Post by vgt »

pekk wrote: post #64
csense wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can immediately off the top off my head think of no less than four examples of useful services Google has discontinued or EOL'ed: Google Reader, Google Code, Google Wave, and XMPP support for Google Voice. So as well as potential future price hikes, you should be prepared for the possibility that this service might not be around for the long haul. Therefore you should skip using any Google-specific functionality, a…

You're right, though I wouldn't compare App Engine to things like Google Reader. When Google EOLs a highly-visible free service like Reader, it generates a lot of outrage, but consumers can find a replacement like Feedly at reasonably low cost. The risk of writing apps on a platform like App Engine is far greater because people tend to spend years building software and a business tightly interwoven with the platform,…

Google AppEngine is just one part of Google Cloud. The discussion and article at hand are specifically about Google Compute Engine.

Re: Introducing Preemptible VMs

#70

Post by TheLoneWolfling »

biot wrote: post #67
csense wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can immediately off the top off my head think of no less than four examples of useful services Google has discontinued or EOL'ed: Google Reader, Google Code, Google Wave, and XMPP support for Google Voice. So as well as potential future price hikes, you should be prepared for the possibility that this service might not be around for the long haul. Therefore you should skip using any Google-specific functionality, a…

Amazon has discontinued Flexible Payment Services, Amazon Webstore Services, and others. Presumably your warning to not rely on proprietary implementations is vendor-agnostic?

Pretty much.

Or at the very least: never rely on one vendor's proprietary implementation(s). Always have at least two in active use (though you can do something like using one vendor 95% of the time), and if/when one goes down make it your top priority to find another.

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