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Google Cloud has lowered some of the prices of its Spot VMs, which could be welcome news for customers on a budget.
Google Cloud’s Spot VMs allow customers to purchase VMs from a pool of unused spare capacity at a discounted price compared to pay-as-you-go, at a discount of 60% to 91% according to its own estimates (opens in new tab).
The cloud giant has now reduced prices for standard and custom Spot VMs and memory in 37 resource pools, with discounts of up to 11% (on top of 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 preemption of VMs”.
For example, batch processing jobs can run on Spot VMs and if some of those VMs stop during processing, the job will slow down but not stop completely.
Google says Spot VMs can run your batch processing jobs without adding an extra load to your existing VMs and without paying full price for additional standard VMs.
However, Spot VMs also have some drawbacks. Spot VMs are finite Compute Engine resources, so they may not always be available.
In addition, Spot VMs can’t live to migrate to standard VMs while they’re running or set to reboot automatically when there’s a hosted event.
What types of discounts are there?
To keep up to date with Spot VM pricing, visit here (opens in new tab) for real-time updates.
While Spot discounts apply to GPUs and local SSDs, Google is not currently updating these prices.
- Want to see how Google Cloud’s pricing compares to the competition? Check out our guide to the best cloud storage available.