9 ms·

Why would you use that instead of bare metal? You'll come out >$4k per month with sustainable use, for that price you get the same power in bare metal? Preempt

by dx034 9y ago

Why would you use that instead of bare metal? You'll come out >$4k per month with sustainable use, for that price you get the same power in bare metal? Preemptible is a bit cheaper but are 600GB memory really worth it for short running applications? Until you loaded everything in memory your machine probably gets destroyed.. EDIT: Not sure about the exact CPU performance but should be quite close to what OVH offers here? With the same memory configuration and 2TB NVMe this still costs <$1,500/month (https://www.ovh.co.uk/dedicated_servers/hg/180bhg1.xml https://www.ovh.co.uk/dedicated_servers/hg/180bhg1.xml).

DasIch 9y ago
There are quite a few problems where you need a lot of memory and CPU performance for just a relatively short amount of time like a few hours per day or even just a few hours per week. Forecasting or complex optimization problems for example. In these cases the amount of money you spend on hardware virtual or otherwise is negligible. Depending on what you do it might just as well be a rounding error.
mpartel 9y ago
There's the high-cpu variant with only 86.4 GB of RAM
- dx034 9y ago
  But that one costs 6.4x the 16 core variant for 6x the cores. Are there any applications where you're heavily dependent on having all cores in one machine?
  - nl 9y ago
    Yes. XGBoost will use all the cores you throw at it, and despite the recent work on GPU versions most of the time CPU cores are best. I'll commonly run a model for 48 hours on an i7. I'd love to be able to try more models.
  - dagw 9y ago
    Anything where the workers have to synchronize their work with each other often. Having everybody talking to each other over the network quickly kills performance.
bpicolo 9y ago
If your data is in Google/AWS cloud, it's expensive to process it outside Google/AWS.
jo909 9y ago
You can find a cheaper bare metal system with comparable performance for every instance type. That is not a new argument for high vCPU/Memory instances. If (monthly) price is the main concern "the cloud" is probably not for you. Other people obviously massively value the benefits of it and pay the premium, and that is not suddenly going to stop for a new instance size.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- dna_polymerase 9y ago
  In addition to that, those instances might be deployed for short time were much power at once is needed and powered off after that. In that case the cloud might even be cheaper as Google offers pricing by Minute (or was it second now?) whereas most bare metal providers bill by the month.
  - ChrisAntaki 9y ago
    Per second, with a one minute minimum [1]. [1] https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2017/09/extending-per-second-billing-in-google.html https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2017/09/extending-per-s...
  - cliffy 9y ago
    "Most bare metal providers bill by the month." Maybe you mean dedicated hosting providers? Any provider letting you spin up bare-metal through an API almost certainly bills at much finer grain than monthly, although they may quote monthly prices to make it easier for customers to assess cost.
skywhopper 9y ago
There is overhead for space, reliability, networking, and maintenance for bare metal. If you have an existing datacenter the marginal costs are tiny, but if you are only in the cloud or not planning to need these beasts for years on end, the net costs are much lower to just harness the economies of scale provided by GCP, AWS, et al. As for OVH, the amount you’d save in networking between that box and the rest of your infrastructure by having everything on one cloud provider probably pays for the difference. Add in flexible network storage options and integration with existing security infrastructure. You are thinking too small by comparing a single box to a single box.
- jonatron 9y ago
  You are thinking too big by talking about having an existing datacenter. Many companies colocate anywhere from 1U to a private room with many racks in an shared datacenter.
  - dexterdog 9y ago
    And most people that have a tiny part of a shared datacenter still call it their datacenter.
perlgeek 9y ago
What if you don't have sustained usage? What if you are developing software for scientific data processing, and you usually work on small data sets for testing, and once in a while you have huge computing needs?
- lqdc13 9y ago
  Isn't it what beowulf clusters are for? It's never cheaper in the cloud.
  - TallGuyShort 9y ago
    No. Scientific workloads rarely scale well when having to do a lot of communication over a commodity network. You're also assuming people would rather have a bunch of machines lying around that they had to pay upfront for than just paying for an occasional single instance? You're oversimplifying things if you literally think it never makes financial sense to use the cloud. It's the same as saying it's never cheaper to have health insurance. Objectively, that has to be true on average, yeah, but then why do so many people buy health insurance? You're managing complex risk at the expense of overhead. Even when it sucks, it's not feasible for everyone to keep enough cash laying around for when they get hit by a bus.
- fredsted 9y ago
  >What if you don't have sustained usage? Well, that's where cloud servers are great. You'll need to break out Excel and calculate whether it's worth it with regards to usage.
nl 9y ago
We used a config not quite this big for a Nominatium database rebuild. It takes weeks on an underpowered server, but hours (or a day?) on something with enough resources. Once rebuilt, using the database is fine on a normal server.
jpalomaki 9y ago
Maybe you need the capacity only for some hours here there? If all your data and other processing is in cloud A, moving some processing to B might not be feasible (moving lots of data takes time, security requirements may complicate setup)
- j_s 9y ago
  One of the biggest data-lockin factors is network I/O costs. These have been kept artificially high by all cloud providers and act both to deter import/export and also to subsidize other functionality.
  - rightos 9y ago
    Yeah, you're not kidding. I run semi-bandwidth intensive applications and DigitalOcean and LightSail are actually better deals than EC2 for the amount of bandwidth. $5/mo for 1 TB on DO/LS vs $90 for 1 TB on EC2. We use a mix of dedicated hardware and DO/LS to meet our needs as bandwidth on the major cloud providers was just too expensive.
    - j_s 9y ago
      There are providers that offer unlimited bandwidth that HN users have tested: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14247795 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14247795 > notamy: I have an application on OVH (on the USD $3.50/month plan) that pushes/pulls >10TB/month That entire discussion is recommended for anyone looking for a cheap VPS.
      - rightos 9y ago
        Yeah, OVH is great, I highly recommend them, we use their cheap dedicated servers via Kimsufi and SoYouStart at a few locations. I seem to recall a friend having stability issues with their VPSes several years ago, so we stuck to the dedicated stuff from them, but it's been extremely good especially considering the price. Have you had good stability with their VPS services?
earlybike 9y ago
> >$4k per month with sustainable use, for that price you get the same power in bare metal? not so sure about that + a hoster who provides such a machine as bare metal wants a setup fee, needs time to setup and a minimum contract duration much longer than one month guess there are not many hosters which have such a beast as bare metal in stock and available in few minutes (are they any hosters at all?); they will order sch machine themselves and you will wait at least a week
- rescbr 9y ago
  There's IBM/Softlayer for that. Their hourly bare metal offering goes up to just 256 GB of RAM, though. More than that and you'll have to do a monthly commitment.
- corford 9y ago
  You could order 16 of these https://www.hetzner.com/dedicated-rootserver/px121-ssd https://www.hetzner.com/dedicated-rootserver/px121-ssd Minimum contract length: 1 month, total cost (including setup): $4,384 (on-going month to month cost thereafter: ~$2,191.20). For that you'd get an aggregate total of 4TB RAM, 7.6TB HDD (SSD), 96 real Intel E5-1650 v3 cores (or 192 vCPUs) and 800TB of bandwidth. Sprinkle with terraform/ansible/k8s/docker and you have a resilient, massively powerful compute cloud with no long term obligation that's about half the price of GCE if you keep it around beyond 30 days. Or another way to look at it: if you needed such a platform for two years, your second year would be free compared to GCE. One major issue with this approach (versus GCE's "all in one" box) could be network performance bottlenecks depending on what task(s) you were using such a cluster for.
- shaklee3 9y ago
  Bare metal 48 ht cores for $1000/mo: https://www.packet.net/bare-metal/servers/type-2-virtualization/ https://www.packet.net/bare-metal/servers/type-2-virtualizat... So we've established that aws is far more expensive now since the tco is taken into account in both cases.
gregmac 9y ago
For one reason, if you only need the one system, you almost certainly need to compare the cost to owning and maintaining two. If you can't tolerate the server being down for more than the lead time it takes to get a new one, you need to already have one on standby. The lead time is probably at least a couple weeks, but there's no guarantees since you're depending on vendor availability and hundreds of other things out of your control. Depending on what you're running on it, you'll also probably want to test software upgrades and have fallback plans when you deploy. The thing the "cloud" version gets you is zero lead time, along with the ability to spin up a second instance (or ten, if you want) while you deploy a new version or just want to do some testing.
manigandham 9y ago
These are still 4 to 5 figure prices. Larger companies really don't care about these tiny fees, especially compared to the licensing costs of the software running on these servers. It gets the job done faster and easier, so it's worth it, especially when everything else might already be in Google Cloud.
- olegkikin 9y ago
  Here's a server with 512GB RAM, 40 cores for $1,850: http://www.ebay.com/itm/122593732313 http://www.ebay.com/itm/122593732313
  - manigandham 9y ago
    ...ok? As I just said, we (as a company) dont care about a few thousand per month in exchange for letting Google Cloud handle everything for us. We're definitely not interested in buying some used server from ebay and then figuring out where to run it.
  - akoncius 9y ago
    then you would need multiple of them (for redundancy) if you use it in production environment, then goes addirional maintenance of hard drives and so on. so what would be end prive for bare bones?
  - briffle 9y ago
    Cool. So, where do you put that server? does it have sufficient power, AC, generators, UPS? How much does that cost per month? Who monitors that PC, and does preventative maintenance, etc? If a part looks like its going to fail, where do you migrate your workload to, so you can take that server offline for repairs. (you need multiple servers) Since you have multiple servers, how much does your 40GB networking cost (with 100GB uplinks) so you aren't constrained by the network? And what kind of storage network do you have, so that you can live-migrate these running machines around to different machines? Lastly, if you co-locate the server somewhere, what does it cost for multiple redundant internet connections to the facility? And where is your failover facility, that is at least a few hundred miles away?
rightos 9y ago
> https://www.ovh.co.uk/dedicated_servers/hg/180bhg1.xml https://www.ovh.co.uk/dedicated_servers/hg/180bhg1.xml Yeah, the main reason to go with Amazon in this case is if you only need the box for a few hours (ie: you're doing data science or similar). For long term high load use, bare metal, even managed bare metal like that is almost always cheaper.
kevin42 9y ago
I used a GCE to test some image processing software I wrote a while ago (it runs on a very large dataset). I configured a 64 core machine with 128gb of memory. It ran perfectly, although it cost about $200 to run the test for a day. Sure, it wasn't the highest performance per CPU, but I didn't have to buy the bare metal, I can scale up the number of cores if need be, and I can fire one up whenever I want one.
- qaq 9y ago
  You do realize that it was not actually a 64 core machine?
  - mehrdada 9y ago
    I wonder why you were downvoted. A 64 core machine would have 128 vCPUs
    - vonmoltke 9y ago
      Not necessarily. Depends on the CPU architecture and whether hardware threading is enabled.
      - _wmd 9y ago
        In the context of GCE they're documented specifically as a single hyperthread
- dx034 9y ago
  For the price of 2-3 days you should be able to get a dedicated OVH server for a month. The 64 GCP cores are 32 real cores, so monthly rent of $600 should get you there.
StillBored 9y ago
Not only that but due to the usual NUMA mismatch, additional page tables, iommu, poor storage connectivity/sharing, etc between the bare metal and the VM, the VM is likely losing a significant chunk of perf vs the bare metal. Frankly, I have a hard time understanding why the convenience of being able to call an API to get a VM (vs using an API to get bare metal) continues to be an advantage. I am reminded of the reddit articles about all the effort they went through to re-optimize their app (by batching queries) for the longer database latencies at AWS... Its like they never considered all that work might also apply to bare metal and save them even more money...
bogomipz 9y ago
>"Why would you use that instead of bare metal?" I would think lead time. To get the quote from your hardware vendor, get the PO approved from finance, get the box built and shipped, getting it racked and stacked in DC. This whole sequence can easily take longer than a month.
- Animats 9y ago
  You can rent a bare metal server from Codero and get it provisioned in about an hour. Prices from about $100 to $1000 a month. At the high end, you get roughly what Google is offering here.
revelation 9y ago
The problem with this isn't the price for the computing power / memory, the killer are the traffic costs in the cloud that are going to bankrupt you before this thing is even at half utilization.
closeparen 9y ago
Everyone jumps to OVH for dedicated server price comparisons, but what about pricing for similar US coastal datacenter locations? Are there even US dedicated server providers with pricing lower than “call us?” I totally believe that OVH is cheapest for European companies serving European customers, but that’s apples to oranges when we’re talking about American cloud providers.
- betaby 9y ago
  OVH Montreal is 8ms away rtt from NYC
- foobarbazetc 9y ago
  We host at IBM/SoftLayer and our bare metal pricing comes in at around 33% of these high mem GCE instances.
sfifs 9y ago
I had a big simulation to run that required lots of memory and lots of cores. I rented a machine for some 10 hours that it took and happily paid the 30-40 dollars that were charged. those machines have a lot of value for specific workloads.

by dx034 9y ago

DasIch 9y ago

There are quite a few problems where you need a lot of memory and CPU performance for just a relatively short amount of time like a few hours per day or even just a few hours per week. Forecasting or complex optimization problems for example. In these cases the amount of money you spend on hardware virtual or otherwise is negligible. Depending on what you do it might just as well be a rounding error.

mpartel 9y ago

There's the high-cpu variant with only 86.4 GB of RAM

dx034 9y ago
But that one costs 6.4x the 16 core variant for 6x the cores. Are there any applications where you're heavily dependent on having all cores in one machine?
- nl 9y ago
  Yes. XGBoost will use all the cores you throw at it, and despite the recent work on GPU versions most of the time CPU cores are best. I'll commonly run a model for 48 hours on an i7. I'd love to be able to try more models.
- dagw 9y ago
  Anything where the workers have to synchronize their work with each other often. Having everybody talking to each other over the network quickly kills performance.

bpicolo 9y ago

If your data is in Google/AWS cloud, it's expensive to process it outside Google/AWS.

jo909 9y ago

You can find a cheaper bare metal system with comparable performance for every instance type. That is not a new argument for high vCPU/Memory instances. If (monthly) price is the main concern "the cloud" is probably not for you. Other people obviously massively value the benefits of it and pay the premium, and that is not suddenly going to stop for a new instance size.

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
dna_polymerase 9y ago
In addition to that, those instances might be deployed for short time were much power at once is needed and powered off after that. In that case the cloud might even be cheaper as Google offers pricing by Minute (or was it second now?) whereas most bare metal providers bill by the month.
- ChrisAntaki 9y ago
  Per second, with a one minute minimum [1]. [1] https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2017/09/extending-per-second-billing-in-google.html https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2017/09/extending-per-s...
- cliffy 9y ago
  "Most bare metal providers bill by the month." Maybe you mean dedicated hosting providers? Any provider letting you spin up bare-metal through an API almost certainly bills at much finer grain than monthly, although they may quote monthly prices to make it easier for customers to assess cost.

skywhopper 9y ago

There is overhead for space, reliability, networking, and maintenance for bare metal. If you have an existing datacenter the marginal costs are tiny, but if you are only in the cloud or not planning to need these beasts for years on end, the net costs are much lower to just harness the economies of scale provided by GCP, AWS, et al. As for OVH, the amount you’d save in networking between that box and the rest of your infrastructure by having everything on one cloud provider probably pays for the difference. Add in flexible network storage options and integration with existing security infrastructure. You are thinking too small by comparing a single box to a single box.

jonatron 9y ago
You are thinking too big by talking about having an existing datacenter. Many companies colocate anywhere from 1U to a private room with many racks in an shared datacenter.
- dexterdog 9y ago
  And most people that have a tiny part of a shared datacenter still call it their datacenter.

perlgeek 9y ago

What if you don't have sustained usage? What if you are developing software for scientific data processing, and you usually work on small data sets for testing, and once in a while you have huge computing needs?

lqdc13 9y ago
Isn't it what beowulf clusters are for? It's never cheaper in the cloud.
- TallGuyShort 9y ago
  No. Scientific workloads rarely scale well when having to do a lot of communication over a commodity network. You're also assuming people would rather have a bunch of machines lying around that they had to pay upfront for than just paying for an occasional single instance? You're oversimplifying things if you literally think it never makes financial sense to use the cloud. It's the same as saying it's never cheaper to have health insurance. Objectively, that has to be true on average, yeah, but then why do so many people buy health insurance? You're managing complex risk at the expense of overhead. Even when it sucks, it's not feasible for everyone to keep enough cash laying around for when they get hit by a bus.
fredsted 9y ago
>What if you don't have sustained usage? Well, that's where cloud servers are great. You'll need to break out Excel and calculate whether it's worth it with regards to usage.

nl 9y ago

We used a config not quite this big for a Nominatium database rebuild. It takes weeks on an underpowered server, but hours (or a day?) on something with enough resources. Once rebuilt, using the database is fine on a normal server.

jpalomaki 9y ago

Maybe you need the capacity only for some hours here there? If all your data and other processing is in cloud A, moving some processing to B might not be feasible (moving lots of data takes time, security requirements may complicate setup)

j_s 9y ago
One of the biggest data-lockin factors is network I/O costs. These have been kept artificially high by all cloud providers and act both to deter import/export and also to subsidize other functionality.
- rightos 9y ago
  Yeah, you're not kidding. I run semi-bandwidth intensive applications and DigitalOcean and LightSail are actually better deals than EC2 for the amount of bandwidth. $5/mo for 1 TB on DO/LS vs $90 for 1 TB on EC2. We use a mix of dedicated hardware and DO/LS to meet our needs as bandwidth on the major cloud providers was just too expensive.
  - j_s 9y ago
    There are providers that offer unlimited bandwidth that HN users have tested: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14247795 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14247795 > notamy: I have an application on OVH (on the USD $3.50/month plan) that pushes/pulls >10TB/month That entire discussion is recommended for anyone looking for a cheap VPS.
    - rightos 9y ago
      Yeah, OVH is great, I highly recommend them, we use their cheap dedicated servers via Kimsufi and SoYouStart at a few locations. I seem to recall a friend having stability issues with their VPSes several years ago, so we stuck to the dedicated stuff from them, but it's been extremely good especially considering the price. Have you had good stability with their VPS services?

earlybike 9y ago

> >$4k per month with sustainable use, for that price you get the same power in bare metal? not so sure about that + a hoster who provides such a machine as bare metal wants a setup fee, needs time to setup and a minimum contract duration much longer than one month guess there are not many hosters which have such a beast as bare metal in stock and available in few minutes (are they any hosters at all?); they will order sch machine themselves and you will wait at least a week

rescbr 9y ago
There's IBM/Softlayer for that. Their hourly bare metal offering goes up to just 256 GB of RAM, though. More than that and you'll have to do a monthly commitment.
corford 9y ago
You could order 16 of these https://www.hetzner.com/dedicated-rootserver/px121-ssd https://www.hetzner.com/dedicated-rootserver/px121-ssd Minimum contract length: 1 month, total cost (including setup): $4,384 (on-going month to month cost thereafter: ~$2,191.20). For that you'd get an aggregate total of 4TB RAM, 7.6TB HDD (SSD), 96 real Intel E5-1650 v3 cores (or 192 vCPUs) and 800TB of bandwidth. Sprinkle with terraform/ansible/k8s/docker and you have a resilient, massively powerful compute cloud with no long term obligation that's about half the price of GCE if you keep it around beyond 30 days. Or another way to look at it: if you needed such a platform for two years, your second year would be free compared to GCE. One major issue with this approach (versus GCE's "all in one" box) could be network performance bottlenecks depending on what task(s) you were using such a cluster for.
shaklee3 9y ago
Bare metal 48 ht cores for $1000/mo: https://www.packet.net/bare-metal/servers/type-2-virtualization/ https://www.packet.net/bare-metal/servers/type-2-virtualizat... So we've established that aws is far more expensive now since the tco is taken into account in both cases.

gregmac 9y ago

For one reason, if you only need the one system, you almost certainly need to compare the cost to owning and maintaining two. If you can't tolerate the server being down for more than the lead time it takes to get a new one, you need to already have one on standby. The lead time is probably at least a couple weeks, but there's no guarantees since you're depending on vendor availability and hundreds of other things out of your control. Depending on what you're running on it, you'll also probably want to test software upgrades and have fallback plans when you deploy. The thing the "cloud" version gets you is zero lead time, along with the ability to spin up a second instance (or ten, if you want) while you deploy a new version or just want to do some testing.

manigandham 9y ago

These are still 4 to 5 figure prices. Larger companies really don't care about these tiny fees, especially compared to the licensing costs of the software running on these servers. It gets the job done faster and easier, so it's worth it, especially when everything else might already be in Google Cloud.

olegkikin 9y ago
Here's a server with 512GB RAM, 40 cores for $1,850: http://www.ebay.com/itm/122593732313 http://www.ebay.com/itm/122593732313
- manigandham 9y ago
  ...ok? As I just said, we (as a company) dont care about a few thousand per month in exchange for letting Google Cloud handle everything for us. We're definitely not interested in buying some used server from ebay and then figuring out where to run it.
- akoncius 9y ago
  then you would need multiple of them (for redundancy) if you use it in production environment, then goes addirional maintenance of hard drives and so on. so what would be end prive for bare bones?
- briffle 9y ago
  Cool. So, where do you put that server? does it have sufficient power, AC, generators, UPS? How much does that cost per month? Who monitors that PC, and does preventative maintenance, etc? If a part looks like its going to fail, where do you migrate your workload to, so you can take that server offline for repairs. (you need multiple servers) Since you have multiple servers, how much does your 40GB networking cost (with 100GB uplinks) so you aren't constrained by the network? And what kind of storage network do you have, so that you can live-migrate these running machines around to different machines? Lastly, if you co-locate the server somewhere, what does it cost for multiple redundant internet connections to the facility? And where is your failover facility, that is at least a few hundred miles away?

rightos 9y ago

> https://www.ovh.co.uk/dedicated_servers/hg/180bhg1.xml https://www.ovh.co.uk/dedicated_servers/hg/180bhg1.xml Yeah, the main reason to go with Amazon in this case is if you only need the box for a few hours (ie: you're doing data science or similar). For long term high load use, bare metal, even managed bare metal like that is almost always cheaper.

kevin42 9y ago

I used a GCE to test some image processing software I wrote a while ago (it runs on a very large dataset). I configured a 64 core machine with 128gb of memory. It ran perfectly, although it cost about $200 to run the test for a day. Sure, it wasn't the highest performance per CPU, but I didn't have to buy the bare metal, I can scale up the number of cores if need be, and I can fire one up whenever I want one.

qaq 9y ago
You do realize that it was not actually a 64 core machine?
- mehrdada 9y ago
  I wonder why you were downvoted. A 64 core machine would have 128 vCPUs
  - vonmoltke 9y ago
    Not necessarily. Depends on the CPU architecture and whether hardware threading is enabled.
    - _wmd 9y ago
      In the context of GCE they're documented specifically as a single hyperthread
dx034 9y ago
For the price of 2-3 days you should be able to get a dedicated OVH server for a month. The 64 GCP cores are 32 real cores, so monthly rent of $600 should get you there.

StillBored 9y ago

Not only that but due to the usual NUMA mismatch, additional page tables, iommu, poor storage connectivity/sharing, etc between the bare metal and the VM, the VM is likely losing a significant chunk of perf vs the bare metal. Frankly, I have a hard time understanding why the convenience of being able to call an API to get a VM (vs using an API to get bare metal) continues to be an advantage. I am reminded of the reddit articles about all the effort they went through to re-optimize their app (by batching queries) for the longer database latencies at AWS... Its like they never considered all that work might also apply to bare metal and save them even more money...

bogomipz 9y ago

>"Why would you use that instead of bare metal?" I would think lead time. To get the quote from your hardware vendor, get the PO approved from finance, get the box built and shipped, getting it racked and stacked in DC. This whole sequence can easily take longer than a month.

Animats 9y ago
You can rent a bare metal server from Codero and get it provisioned in about an hour. Prices from about $100 to $1000 a month. At the high end, you get roughly what Google is offering here.

revelation 9y ago

The problem with this isn't the price for the computing power / memory, the killer are the traffic costs in the cloud that are going to bankrupt you before this thing is even at half utilization.

closeparen 9y ago

Everyone jumps to OVH for dedicated server price comparisons, but what about pricing for similar US coastal datacenter locations? Are there even US dedicated server providers with pricing lower than “call us?” I totally believe that OVH is cheapest for European companies serving European customers, but that’s apples to oranges when we’re talking about American cloud providers.

betaby 9y ago
OVH Montreal is 8ms away rtt from NYC
foobarbazetc 9y ago
We host at IBM/SoftLayer and our bare metal pricing comes in at around 33% of these high mem GCE instances.

sfifs 9y ago

I had a big simulation to run that required lots of memory and lots of cores. I rented a machine for some 10 hours that it took and happily paid the 30-40 dollars that were charged. those machines have a lot of value for specific workloads.