Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Introducing Preemptible VMs

googlecloudplatform.blogspot.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 98 posts

Re: Introducing Preemptible VMs

#81

Post by vidarh »

rwmj wrote: post #25
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.

And for those who truly only need it now and again, it's great.

But time and time again I see infrastructure where people pay for these services for large amount of instances that are running continuously, blindly assuming that it's cheap because it's cloud. There's a bizarre level of price-blindness amongst certain subset of customers of Google Cloud and AWS that I've never seen anywhere else.

Re: Introducing Preemptible VMs

#82

Post by vidarh »

PeterisP wrote: post #77
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…

If I want to run a processing job that takes a 1000 core-hours and have the results today, I can do that on their VMs for a couple dollars per run. Being able to do that on owned hardware or dedicated hosts would be orders of magnitude more expensive. Similarly, if you're running hosted app that on most hours doesn't overload a single server, on peak hour fills three hosts, but on a large advertising event or acciden…

That's true, but those are extreme niche use cases, and in most cases people have a substantial base load that they can run on dedicated servers for anything from 1/2 to 1/3 of the cost of AWS/Azure/Google (even with reserved instances and factoring out retainers for someone to handle ops issues).

Nothing stops you from mixing and matching dedicated servers with handling batch jobs and peaks with cloud servers. In fact, most data centre providers can offer the full range from unfurnished colo space to cloud offerings out of the same data centre these days - either directly or via partners hosted in their buildings. At least that's my experience.

Re: Introducing Preemptible VMs

#83

Post by Nitramp »

abritishguy wrote: post #79
asah wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yes: http://techcrunch.com/2014/03/25/google-drops-prices-for-com... I run a $MM enterprise business almost entirely on GAE/python with a staff of ~40, public-facing site, etc and the monthly bill is under $1500/mon. Sure, I'd prefer lower $ and faster performance but truthfully, I'm no longer complaining: GAE/python saves me $$$ in IT staffing costs including security upgrades on dozens of packages that are either p…

This doesn't surprise me at all. It is trivial to run a site on app engine that can handle hundreds of requests a second continuously without leaving the free tier. Sure, when the change from billing CPU time to instance hours came in some app's bills sky-rocketed. But that was because they were poorly coded such that instances were blocking and unable to serve incoming requests. With a thread safe application and th…

> This doesn't surprise me at all. It is trivial to run a site on app engine that can handle hundreds of requests a second continuously without leaving the free tier.

Really? The free tier comes with 28 instance hours per day. That'd mean your app would have to serve hundreds of requests per second, meaning each request must take substantially less than 10 ms, on a 600 MHz, 128 MB RAM machine.

If your request do any work at all, I doubt you can handle them in <10ms on a 600 MHz CPU.

Re: Introducing Preemptible VMs

#84

Post by abritishguy »

Nitramp wrote: post #83
abritishguy wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This doesn't surprise me at all. It is trivial to run a site on app engine that can handle hundreds of requests a second continuously without leaving the free tier. Sure, when the change from billing CPU time to instance hours came in some app's bills sky-rocketed. But that was because they were poorly coded such that instances were blocking and unable to serve incoming requests. With a thread safe application and th…

> This doesn't surprise me at all. It is trivial to run a site on app engine that can handle hundreds of requests a second continuously without leaving the free tier. Really? The free tier comes with 28 instance hours per day. That'd mean your app would have to serve hundreds of requests per second, meaning each request must take substantially less than 10 ms, on a 600 MHz, 128 MB RAM machine. If your request do any…

>meaning each request must take substantially less than 10 ms

Correction, each request would need to have less than 10ms of CPU time - the instances support concurrency.

My web frontend, by design, does very little - any CPU heavy operations are done by other systems using the task queue. Writing it in golang has helped as well, wouldn't get that performance from python.

Write a simple Hello world example in golang and get it to do some mathematical calculations to simulate "work", I think you'll be surprised at how many requests a second you can squeeze out of a single instance.

Re: Introducing Preemptible VMs

#85

Post by superuser2 »

Klathmon wrote: post #62
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…

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 serv…

Apple and Microsoft may discontinue support/sales but the hardware/software they sold you continues to function. That is inherently not true of "cloud" services.

Re: Introducing Preemptible VMs

#87

Post by jontro »

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…

Deploying to app engine caused us big pain in the long run. I just had to spend two days migrating a legacy app to the new hrd. The migration was painful, app engine "billing bugs" when upgrading etc made the process real hard.

Also when the bugs occured, I realised there was no way to get quick support.

Thankfully we moved our main app away to ec2 around when they increased the pricing a couple of years ago.

Re: Introducing Preemptible VMs

#88

Post by tw04 »

nightcracker wrote: post #44
tw04 wrote: post #30

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.

> Though to build a business model around a resource you can't even determine the availability of. That's exactly why it's cheap: you're trading price for reliability.

reliability != availability. I can build a business model around an unreliable, but available resource. I can't build a business model around an unavailable resource. They're two very different things, and the distinction is important.

Re: Introducing Preemptible VMs

#90

Post by skybrian »

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…

Nit: it looks like it's been 60 second limit on requests since release 1.5.5:

http://googleappengine.blogspot.com/2011/10/app-engine-155-s...

Post reply on HN