When it comes to Big Data, per-minute billing + rapid startup is significant. When you can have a 10,000-core Hadoop cluster in 45 seconds, you stop thinking about it in terms of clusters and start thinking about it in terms of jobs.

Before: Start cluster > submit many jobs to the cluster > manage resources

Now: Submit a job to Dataproc > Start a cluster for each job > shut down the cluster

And, of course, BigQuery gives you the equivalent of per-second billing and 0-second scaling to thousands of cores:

https://cloud.google.com/blog/big-data/2016/02/understanding...