4 ms·

Can you really spin one of these up on demand? That obviously means that they have machines of that size (or greater) sitting idle, waiting for someone to use t

• dx034 9y ago
  They can still divide them up for the smaller sizes preemptible and destroy those once they get a request in. That way utilisation should be quite good. Yield probably not as high (since hardware costs will be higher than for multiple small machines) but the yield of renting out the highest variant sometimes will be worth it.
• misframer 9y ago
  GCP has live migration. Maybe they make space if it doesn't exist.
  • tgtweak 9y ago
    Hard to make hardware appear out of nowhere. They only use live migration to do host maintenance iirc.
    • milesward 9y ago
      There are lots of reasons to shift stuff around, and there’s lots of hardware :) -googler
• ericfrederich 9y ago
  Idle, or running their own internal computations, or running lower preemptiable stuff.
• jsolson 9y ago
  Preemptible VMs exist in part to avoid leaving capacity sitting idle. We hate idle resources. :)
• kevin42 9y ago
  Yes, I configured a 64 cpu machine in a matter of minutes, ran a test on it for 24 hours, then shut it down and deleted the instance. Total cost was around $200.
  • tgtweak 9y ago
    *vCPU. But yes, they probably strive to keep below 10% vacancy on all hardware.