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The comparison with AWS Spot instances are meaningless since with recent shift to per-second pricing, AWS spot market has changed significantly, there is very l

The comparison with AWS Spot instances are meaningless since with recent shift to per-second pricing, AWS spot market has changed significantly, there is very little price volatility but also its almost impossible to get a spot instance with GPU allocated. I almost always get spot-capacity-not-available message. Googles preemptible model achieves a lot more fairer distribution of GPU's as opposed to AWS's model. Though AWS ended up with spot market since you got charged for the entire hour up-front and if AWS evicted you, then you got the entire hour for free, this made pricing spot instances complicated for both users as well as AWS very difficult. With shit to per second billing this issue has been eliminated to a large extent since you only get first 10 minutes free if you get pre-empted within those 10 minutes. tl,dr; GCP preemptible instances are superior to AWS along all possible dimensions, price, flexibility, IO etc.

boulos 9y ago
Disclosure: I work on Google Cloud (and helped launch this). While I appreciate the sentiment, there are certainly things some people prefer about Spot. For example, you basically get up to 4 minutes notice compared to the 30 seconds I chose (see the other thread). Similarly, until this change we didn't offer preemptible VMs with GPUs attached. You're right about the complexity of Spot. Preemptible (and Azure's copy, Low-Priority VMs) is all about a fair, predictable price. Not everyone hates markets, but the number of companies and customers burned by the Spot market gave us the conviction to push for a simpler, fixed price. Again, thanks for the praise (but there are pros and cons!).