Google Cloud has slashed some of the prices of its Spot VMs in what could be welcome news for customers watching their budgets.
Google Cloud's Spot VMs enable customers to purchase VMs from a pool of unused spare capacity at a reduced price compared to pay-as-you-go, at a discount of between 60% to 91% according to its own estimates.
The cloud giant has now lowered prices on standard and custom Spot VMs and memory in 37 resource pools, with discounts of up to 11% available (on top of the existing discounts).
Why would anyone use Spot VMs?
Google recommends Spot VM for users with hosting workloads "that are fault-tolerant and can withstand possible VM preemption".
For example, batch processing jobs can run on Spot VMs, and if some of those VMs stop during processing, the job slows but does not completely stop.
Google says Spot VMs can complete your batch processing tasks without placing additional load on your existing VMs and without you paying full price for additional standard VMs.
However, Spot VMs also have a variety of drawbacks, Spot VMs are finite Compute Engine resources, so they might not always be available.
In addition, Spot VMs can't live to migrate to become standard VMs while they are running or be set to automatically restart when there is a hosted event.
What type of discounts are available?
If you’d like to keep up to date with the prices of Spot VMs, you can head here for real-time updates.
Though Spot discounts apply to GPUs and local SSDs, Google is not currently updating those prices.
- Want to see how Google Cloud’s prices stack up against the competition? Checkout our guide to the best cloud storage available.
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