Hacker News Reader

Comment by mattkrea | Hacker News Reader

> AWS Premium Support is mandatory

This is simply not true. We only pay 49/mo for support. Sure, you can pay for the top-level which starts at 15k/month but it is not mandatory.

The biggest item I'd mention to you is learn to use spot instances. I doubt Google can beat my 2 cents an hour for m3.large servers.

View on HN

We do offer preemptible VMs (https://cloud.google.com/preemptible-vms), which for our n1-highcpu-2 (a 2 vcpu Haswell) comes in at 2c/hr; when you toss in our per-minute instead of hourly billing, we're often 2x cheaper and all without any guesswork or bidding.

Disclaimer: I work on Compute Engine, and specifically preemptible VMs.

In all the AWS workloads I've dealt with none was ever suited to spot instances

We run a bunch of production workloads on them. Just look at the spot pricing history in US-East-1A and 1B for a good idea at the stability.

This is over a year now and only once did I have any sort of interruption and even there it was in only one AZ so of course I had other instances up and able to take the load.

You do know that AWS AZs are different per customer? Your us-east-1a isn't the same as my us-east-1a.

Huh. Do you not use say EMR? We've got lots of folks running Hadoop/Spark either directly or through Dataproc (https://cloud.google.com/dataproc/).

All of our Monte Carlo finance customers as well as the genomics folks at the Broad Institute seem pretty happy.

If you're saying they're a bad fit for stateful applications like databases and web backends, I agree ;).

All the test infrastructure can easily go on test if you have auto-scaling. Some percentage of production, you can move to Spot.

spot instances can be interrupted anytime, there is very limited usage out of those.

True, but you receive a two minute warning. Your app should be performing frequent checkpointing, and be ready to wrap up its work in two minutes. That's plenty of time for most workloads to end gracefully and notify your command and control.

https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-ec2-spot-instance-termi...

Agreed. On our 8 vcpu and higher instances, you can do ~16 Gbps. Even on AWS you can do upwards of 10 Gbps. So worst case scenario, you stream a ton of data at a recovery box.

More likely, you just checkpoint along the way and save to PD / EBS (and then reattach the disk post preemption) or even do ~X Gbps to GCS / S3 and pickup whenever with a fresh VM.

Disclaimer: I work on Preemptible VMs at Google.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com