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GCP releases Spot VMs, the next generation of Pre-emptible VMs

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Re: GCP releases Spot VMs, the next generation of Pre-emptible VMs

#101

Post by shock-value »

cma wrote: post #25
shock-value wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's probably a niche use case, but there is some utility to having a guaranteed daily shutoff. For example, you might spin up an instance as an on-demand remote dev environment, and the 24 hour cutoff ensures it doesn't accidentally get left on (over a weekend, for example). This would be easy to work around, but nonetheless could lead to unexpectedly high charges if you were relying on this behavior only to have it…

Tha sounds like a horrific dev environment, if randomly shut down with 30 seconds notice.

"Horrific" is massive hyperbole, at least for my use case. (I actually use a GCP preemptible instance in this manner for a personal project, and spot instances will have the same shutoff risk.)

I edit application code on my (relatively underpowered) laptop, and automatically mirror it to the instance where the running services picks up any changes, and recompiles and relaunches as needed. It's a fairly chunky app code-wise so moving the CPU usage off of my laptop is very helpful.

When and if the instance shuts off early, I just relaunch it and reconnect. This amounts to one click of the mouse in the GCP UI, one locally run terminal command to connect, and one remote terminal command to (re)start my app. No work lost, and the cost savings are worth the minor inconvenience. Usually the instances last the full 24 hours anyway, and I usually shut it down when I'm done working, so interruptions are very rare.

I can understand that in the context of a larger company with more resources, a dev would be put off by this. But it works very well for my uses.

Re: GCP releases Spot VMs, the next generation of Pre-emptible VMs

#102

Post by sterlind »

Sanguinaire wrote: post #100
Thristle wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't remember Azure having the 24H cutoff. My spots/low priorities used to run for weeks I used LP/spot both as scaling sets and the more recent single VMs Also i wouldn't call the cutoff and grace period as "paths". There were much more substantial differences between the different clouds

I seem to remember the Azure 24 hour limit being in place in 2018, though it wasn't highlighted particularly well and came as a surprise to me. Could well have been removed since.

I suspect the 24h limit is to prevent angry calls from customers who buy spot instances because they're cheaper, then wonder why their VM randomly went down and blame it on Azure.

(I work for Azure but don't know anything about the policies)

Re: GCP releases Spot VMs, the next generation of Pre-emptible VMs

#104

Post by remram »

sitkack wrote: post #76
apendleton wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having worked on infrastructure deployed this way, I can say this oversimplifies a bit. There's virtually never no spot capacity at all, there's no capacity at a given bid price, for a given instance type, in a given region. You can start to scale up on-demand infrastructure using spot price as a signal, before there's literally none left, and you can also run on clusters of heterogeneous instances, and change your i…

No shade, but this is a very AWS specific view of cloud. Every cloud has a different resource allocation philosophy, not all the assumptions are the same.

Yeah, GCP spot instances don't vary in price like AWS ("The price adjustments will occur at most once a month").

Re: GCP releases Spot VMs, the next generation of Pre-emptible VMs

#105

Post by remram »

jpdb wrote: post #93
snewman wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except that (presumably) there is no guarantee that any spot instances are available. You could wind up in a state where you have no instances running. No user-facing production service can tolerate that.

Spot is excess capacity. If there's zero excess capacity, that means there's (probably) also no on-demand capacity as well.

If you are not being given any excess capacity, that doesn't mean there is no excess capacity. You are just not one of the lucky few, whose numbers are shrinking.

Re: GCP releases Spot VMs, the next generation of Pre-emptible VMs

#106

Post by remram »

htrp wrote: post #103
Pirate-of-SV wrote: post #48

Nice, one step closer to AWS. Next up I'd like to see an increase to the 30 second termination notice. 120 seconds would be good enough :)

Just clone AWS down to the API endpoints?

They already replicated the S3 API as an alternative to the Google Cloud Storage API: https://cloud.google.com/storage/docs/migrating#migration-si...

Re: GCP releases Spot VMs, the next generation of Pre-emptible VMs

#107

Post by remram »

travisd wrote: post #4
gravypod wrote: post #2

Any word on pricing?

Changes over time and ranges from 60-91% discount, according to the docs: https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/instances/spot#pricing

If it changes at most once in 30 days, that seems different from AWS.

Re: GCP releases Spot VMs, the next generation of Pre-emptible VMs

#108

Post by remram »

sodality2 wrote: post #82
teraflop wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Among other things, the price cuts are a nice change for ultra-cheap hobby projects that have extremely low resource demands. So far the lowest Spot VM price I've found is e2-micro in us-west4, which costs a whopping $0.69/month for 2GB of RAM and 0.25 of a shared core. That's only 25% the cost of Amazon's comparable t3a.small.

Keep in mind as far as I can tell there's a $1.44 fee for an external IP address (only if it's in use by a preemptible VM). If it's not in use, it's even higher.

Is there a way to avoid paying that fee, if you don't need a public IP address? E.g. can you get NAT for free?

Re: GCP releases Spot VMs, the next generation of Pre-emptible VMs

#109

Post by rp1 »

bb101 wrote: post #68
bb101 wrote: post #63

From https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/instances/preemptible : "Spot VMs (Preview) are the latest version of preemptible VM instances. Preemptible VMs continue to be supported for new and existing VMs, and preemptible VMs now use the same pricing model as Spot VMs . However, Spot VMs provide new features that are not supported for preemptible VMs. For example, preemptible VMs can only run for up to 24 hours at a…

Looking through our history, it looks like us-east-1 preëmptible VMs were a flat 30% the cost of non-preëmptible VMs. So in the worst-case scenario, we'll be paying 10% more for the same product, but also potentially saving up to 19% in periods where GCP has excess capacity.

You'll be paying over 30% more in the worst case, just fyi.

Re: GCP releases Spot VMs, the next generation of Pre-emptible VMs

#110

Post by roland35 »

snewman wrote: post #13
zamalek wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If your code can survive chaos monkey, it can trivially weather this. Netflix, as one example, could run their entire infrastructure on these VMs.

Except that (presumably) there is no guarantee that any spot instances are available. You could wind up in a state where you have no instances running. No user-facing production service can tolerate that.

I believe AWS can create spot autoscaling groups which include a minimum baseline traditional instances plus a floating level of spot instances. This seems to be a nice compromise.
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