I wonder why Google Compute charges a minimum of ten minutes to spin up an instance. I understand there is some setup cost, but ten minutes is $0.00056 for the

I wonder why Google Compute charges a minimum of ten minutes to spin up an instance. I understand there is some setup cost, but ten minutes is $0.00056 for the cheapest (f1-micro) instance [1]. I know this sounds sort of cheap, but that's the cost just to deliver the interface (the VM) that is going to be used. That's a relatively large amount of money to spend on not having any work done at all yet. A diskless VM, which can just send data for storage to a database over HTTP, shouldn't require much setup work, as it really just is the execution of CPU instructions (with the OS being the CPU interface rather than JavaScript). Couldn't someone write a virtualized VM that runs inside Lambda, thus providing zero (or Lambda-equivalent) startup costs for generic VMs? Then the VM would just be a function running inside Lambda, transforming incoming user data and then storing the result in a database, after which it would disappear. Or maybe the OS just is the problem? One model of bypassing it is Lambda-like services, which would be the more centralized solution, while the more decentralized solution (of the two) would be bare metal/unikernels, which basically achieve the same thing: (close to) zero startup time/cost (~30 ms for a HaLVM unikernel). [1] https://cloud.google.com/compute/pricing#billingmodel https://cloud.google.com/compute/pricing#billingmodel