cloud-test: Preemptible VMs now up to 33% cheaper

Google Cloud Platform Blog

Preemptible VMs now up to 33% cheaper

Tuesday, August 9, 2016

Posted by Michael Basilyan, Product Manager Preemptible VMslaunching Preemptible VMsGoogle Cloud PlatformGoogle Compute EngineCitadelrender moviesprocess satellite imagery,analyze genomic data

Add just a single flag (--preemptible) in the gcloud compute instances create command, or by using one of our libraries

Check a single box in the Developer Console create instance page

Launch a quick and easy-to-use Spark/Hadoop cluster with Cloud Dataproc

Autoscale Preemptible VMs with managed instance groups

Render a movie with Zync and choose Preemptible VMs, which is now also up to 15% cheaper!

Resources for Preemptible VMs come out of excess Google Cloud Platform capacity. The load on our Cloud Platform data centers varies with location and time of day, but is generally lowest on nights and weekends — the best time to run large Preemptible VM clusters.

We avoid preempting too many VMs from a single customer and, given the choice, preempt VMs that were launched most recently. This might be a bit frustrating at first, but in the long run, this strategy helps minimize lost work across your cluster. And because we don’t bill for VMs preempted in the first 10 minutes, it saves on costs too.

It’s a good idea to retry once or twice, even if you’ve been preempted early. Combining regular and Preemptible VMs in your clusters will ensure that tasks proceed at an adequate pace.

Manage shutdown and preemption notices with a shutdown script that saves a job’s progress so that it can pick up where it left off, rather than start over from scratch.