For workloads like yours, per-minute billing is amazing. It lets you have a simpler architecture (machine failed? no problem, just re-enqueue the single video

For workloads like yours, per-minute billing is amazing. It lets you have a simpler architecture (machine failed? no problem, just re-enqueue the single video or chunk that it was handling) and is economically equivalent to running the work back-to-back. We want to encourage you to do this, because internally we would never expect someone to keep some long running jobs up to run mapreduces. To entice you some more, custom machine types are also a huge differentiator here. The jump in cost and number of cores between fixed instance shapes is huge. When choosing between the c4.4xlarge and 8xlarge, you've got just over a 2x jump in price and performance. With custom machine types, you could nudge yourself upwards to say 18 vCPUs or 24 (and can even tune the type to your resolution). So take a look! We've got a free trial of $300 for 60 days. Disclosure: I work on Compute Engine (and specifically, Preemptible VMs).