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Introducing E2, new cost-optimized general purpose VMs for Google Compute Engine
- wyldfire 7y agoStill no ARM VMs? AWS is (still) out ahead of GCE.
- raybb 7y agoI'm ignorant here. Why does it matter to you if your code is running on ARM or x86?
- verdverm 7y agoSupport for arm is not as pervasive as x86, if you are using docker you need to be mindful of the base images
- justicezyx 7y agoOptionality, choice, ultimately the freedom. For one thing, everyone is painfully aware of Intel's monopoly pricing a few years ago before AMD came back to life. To prevent this, 3 supplier of CPUs seems minimal, so there can be dynamism of check and balance. (2 is insufficient, as seen from Intel vs. AMD)
- wyldfire 7y agoIt doesn't, that's what's great about it. But ARM equipment is generally better value than x86 and I would expect Google to offer it as a more affordable target config (like AWS does).
- rbanffy 7y agoSo, if Google offers a better value on x86, it's equivalent to AWS offering a better value on ARM. Google doesn't own a company that designs ARM processors (IIRC)
- bryanlarsen 7y agoOne advantage of Amazon's ARM is that it doesn't do hyperthreading, so when you rent a "thread" you actually get a full core rather than half a core.
- seriesf 7y agoOr in other words, when your ARM without SMT stalls, the execution resources are wasted, as Xenu intended. Letting another program use the functional units unused by your program is an abomination before Xenu.
- user5994461 7y agoWhich ironically would probably prevent adoption of ARM. People care about and compare core counts. Get a single core ARM instance for almost the price of a double core x86 instance. Not a great marketing speech.
- wmf 7y agoNo, it's the opposite. An ARM core is much cheaper than an x86 core so you can get more cores for the money. And an ARM core is cheaper than an x86 thread while providing more consistent performance.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- chrisseaton 7y agoIf other people want to run on ARM, then I need to test my code on ARM, so that's why I want it.
- verdverm 7y agoStill no custom VM configurations for CPU, MEM, GPU/TPU, local SSD? Google seems to (still) be ahead of AWS there. Compare their respective relationships with OSS
- outworlder 7y agoStill no live VM migrations? GCE is still out ahead of AWS. We can do this all day.
- ti_ranger 7y ago> Still no live VM migrations? Based on what evidence? Statements from Google that AWS doesn't do live migration?
- fortytw2 7y agoBoth EPYC and Intel chips behind these? So is there potential for much different performance between the same sized instance based on chance?
- rbanffy 7y agoI would assume the better the core performance, the more vCPUs it can offer, vCPU being an arbitrary performance reference.
- fortytw2 7y agoAh, I've been assuming that a vCPU == a CPU hyperthread since forever, hadn't realized that changed.
- boulos 7y agoDisclosure: I work on Google Cloud. Your mental model is correct: vCPU means hyperthread (except for shared core things like the f1-micro, g1-small, etc.). We had a different measure of "relative performance" called GCEU (GCE Units) but stopped publishing that as it's pretty meaningless for most people. We do our platform qualifications at Google to ensure that for users that "don't care" which CPU platform that they're on, that they get improving performance/$ and so on. But for GCE, we clearly document instead the platforms and base/all-core/single-core frequencies we use [1]. tl;dr: if you want to choose your processor, stick with N2/C2 and our upcoming AMD machine types. If you're okay with us deciding for you and want a big discount, give E2 a spin! [1] https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/cpu-platforms https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/cpu-platforms
- rbanffy 7y agoThanks for the correction. When did you stop using GCEUs?
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- cerberusss 7y agoBut what do they cost? Isn't there a monthly price tag, so I can compare with other VPS providers?
- jsty 7y agohttps://cloud.google.com/compute/all-pricing#e2_machine-types https://cloud.google.com/compute/all-pricing#e2_machine-type...
- bullen 7y agoold - f1-micro $0.0076 - .6GB 1 core @ .2 fraction new - e2-micro $0.0083 - 1GB 2 cores @ .125 fraction per core? Pretty cool if your code can use multiple cores efficiently, specially if each virtual core is guaranteed a separate physical core then this is really good! = if one core gets a congestion peak maybe the other won't. For less than a buck/month you get better parallelism and .4GB RAM! Sadly still no pre-purchased committed usage discount for the shared CPU instances! ---- For those with big budgets: old - n1-standard-1 $0.0475 - 3.75GB 1 core new - e2-standard-2 $0.06701 - 8GB 2 cores (0.00001 really?) I also wish we had some computation power comparison metric so that we could stop looking at apples and bananas without committing. For monthly you multiply by 730 I think.
- bullen 7y agoReplying to myself again: So you will NOT get two physical cores, both HyperThreads will be on the same physical core so no real benefits to having these smaller shared instances give you "2 cores"? See my comments for feedback from AWS engineer. I'm guessing since both AWS and GCE run the same hypervisor now that GCE will have the same "feature"?
- hadlock 7y agoVery roughly, looks like between $7 and $14 for the lowest end, per month. Scaling up as you add more capabilities.
- Copenjin 7y agoThey say that the performance is similar to n1 and the price is lower, but they are not talking about preemptible price, that's more or less the same for both types.
- mrwnmonm 7y agodoes it have auto vertical scaling?
- ZeroCool2u 7y ago>Flexibility: You can tailor your E2 instance with up to 16 >vCPUs and 128 GB of memory. At the same time, you only pay >for the resources that you need with 15 new predefined >configurations or the ability to use custom machine types. I didn't think so, but this sentence almost seems to imply that you pay for the performance ceiling when you're using it, but not when your application is idle. Would be nice to have this clarified if that's not what this means.
- nicoburns 7y agoWhat servers are they using with 200 physical threads?
- seriesf 7y agoNot sure but a 9200-series Xeon with two sockets would be 224 threads in a box.
- Dylan16807 7y ago4 socket boards (or 8) make a lot more sense than those abominations, though. Two entirely separate CPUs in one package for a vastly increased price...
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- wmf 7y ago4S Xeon or 2S Rome. Presumably Google has negotiated away the Platinum tax so 4S becomes more efficient than 2S.
- devhwrng 7y agoThe technical details about the E2 instance class are really interesting: https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/compute/understanding-dynamic-resource-management-in-e2-vms https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/compute/understanding... Rather than a guaranteed core and RAM as with N1/N2, resources for the underlying host can be dynamically balanced through live migrations, which GCP has already been using for years. Cool solution, and should work to save money for most workloads.
- bullen 7y agoI wonder when we will get instances that can scale dynamically at runtime! That would be so cool, just adding cores if the load goes up! You would have to make sure your code has enough threads ready to fill those cores though! (if you use non-blocking async. stuff) Or is this what they mean it already has? Edit: thinking more about this it must be really hard and require kernel fixes? I mean how would linux behave when you add/remove cores and RAM f.ex.?
- synack 7y agoCPU hotplug has been supported for a long time. I once managed some Sun boxes that allowed replacing/upgrading CPUs without shutting down... They don't build em like that anymore.
- AaronFriel 7y agoLinux and Windows have both supported it, but use tends to be at the fringes on mainframe/datacenter machines that are validated for it and so those paths aren't tested on a very wide variety of hardware and running applications. And adding CPUs and memory is one thing but removing is another.
- kllrnohj 7y agoCPU cores being hotplugged on & off was actually super common for a few years, and still is in a lot more devices than you'd expect. It used to be a corner stone of power management on mobile devices. The Nexus 5, for example, would regularly run with just a single core online, hotplugging the other 3 off until hit with a load and then brought cores back online 1 by 1 as needed. That behavior still is in some corners of the mobile world, but increasingly less so. So the CPU hotplug path is as a result actually a lot more battle hardened than you'd expect, and a lot more consumer software than you'd think ran just fine in that setup without noticing.
- seriesf 7y agoThe accompanying technical blog is more interesting than the announcement. It implies they may have ported or adapted Borg’s antagonistic workload scheduling features to cloud. Huge if true, as they say.
- Someone1234 7y agoJust because the page didn't actually include pricing... E2-Standard: - 2x vCPU, 8GB: $48.92/month. - 4x vCPU, 16GB: $97.83/month. - 16x vCPU, 64GB: $391.35/month. E2-HighMem: - 2x vCPU, 16GB: $65.99/month. - 8x vCPU, 64GB: $263.97/month. - 16x vCPU, 128GB: $527.94/month. E2-HighCPU: - 2x vCPU, 2GB: $36.11/month. - 8x vCPU, 8GB: $144.45/month. - 16x vCPU, 16GB: $288.90/month. I didn't list Preemptible Pricing because it is very workload specific/niche.
- dang 7y agoSince commenters are saying that the technical post is more interesting, we switched to that from https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/compute/google-compute-engine-gets-new-e2-vm-machine-types https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/compute/google-comput..., which is the announcement post. Maybe we'll keep the original title so it's clear it's a new thing.
- mythz 7y agoTrying to find out how much cheaper these new E2 instances are, these are the Monthly prices taken from their Compute Pricing page [1]: Machine type VCPUs Memory Price Preemptible price n1-standard-2 2 7.5GB $48.55 $14.60 e2-standard-2 2 8GB $48.92 $14.67 So how does E2 offer "31% savings compared to N1"? Whatever it is, there seems to be some kind of disconnect as it's not obvious from their pricing pages and they should provide better transparency on exactly where these savings are. [1] https://cloud.google.com/compute/all-pricing https://cloud.google.com/compute/all-pricing
- boulos 7y agoDisclosure: I work on Google Cloud. That should have been made more clear, sorry about that. On a per-second basis without a sustained use discount (so for burstier workloads, autoscaling, etc.) the E2 is ~31% cheaper (therefore the marketing "up to"). Clarifying your example: n1-std-2 is currently 9.5c/hour (which would be $69.35/month without Sustained-Use Discounting), but e2-std-2 is 6.7c/hr regardless of how many hours per month you use it. Which is about 30%.
- mythz 7y agoI'm not a fan of manual inefficiencies of AWS's Reserved Pricing but at least their pricing is clear. I see all these different prices being floated around but I'm still not clear on how much GCP's compute cost for the most popular scenario of running a website 24/7 would be. It looks like AWS's t3.large may be the most comparable with 2x VCPU/8GB RAM which costs $426 for 12 months / $35.50 month. Or for m5.large (2x VCPU/8GB RAM) the cost is $501 for 12 months / $41.75 month. What would the n1-std-2 and e2-std-2 compute cost for 12 months be?
- boulos 7y agoSorry for the lack of clarity (I've tilted at this windmill, and failed). E2-std-2 != t3.large. A t3.large only has a "baseline performance" of 30% [1]. That's more like our e2-small though they have more memory. Instead, I'd compare e2-std-2 to m5.large like you started to do so. An m5.large on-demand is $.096/hr => $70/month, while the e2-std-2 is $48/month. I think your $41.75/month is from the 1-yr Standard RI (a 40% discount). For that, the most direct comparison would be to use a Committed Use Discount on our side which comes with a similar percentage discount (I can't find this on my phone right now) so that's like $29/month. Does that make sense? [1] https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types/t3/ https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types/t3/
- blaisio 7y agoIt seems like this cements Google Cloud's lead in the hardware/infrastructure side. But the real problem with Google Cloud - the lack of software feature parity with AWS - is not addressed. If only there was a provider with AWS services and reliability and Google Cloud infrastructure.
- 9nGQluzmnq3M 7y agoWhat AWS products do you find to be missing on GCP?
- amq 7y agoMySQL 8, for starters.
- TysonGersh 7y agoSo cool!
- TysonGersh 7y agoGo Tyler!!!!
- frew 7y agoIt looks like the play here is to get a bunch of small, committed workloads that GCE can move around where they've got spare capacity. On-demand pricing is very similar to the existing n1 type, but 1yr committed discounts are 30%+ cheaper. More details from when I was working through it: https://twitter.com/fredwulff/status/1204861220165017600 https://twitter.com/fredwulff/status/1204861220165017600
- mochomocha 7y agoI think your analysis is spot on, thanks for sharing.
- boulos 7y agoDisclosure: I work on Google Cloud. Your analysis is close, but the on-demand (per second) pricing is also a lot less expensive. You should think of it as: - Less than a full month w/o commitment => E2 up to ~30% cheaper (particularly for say 273 minutes per month or something). - Full month w/o commitment => Roughly identical. - Full month with a 1-year or 3-year commitment => E2 ~30% cheaper.
- amq 7y agoI wish it was simply flat 30% cheaper. It is very misleading that 0.99% of month will be 30% cheaper than a full month, considering that Google Cloud is advertising sustained usage discounts everywhere.
- brianwawok 7y agoSustained usage has tiers. So .99% of a month would only be like 1% cheaper.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- benbro 7y agoIf anyone from GCP is watching, are there updates about the following? - Global load balancer for UDP. - GCS signed urls for a prefix instead of only per object. - Better latency between Europe and India.
- boulos 7y agoDisclosure: I work on Google Cloud. I don't wanna distract from the E2 launch, but we definitely have gotten the message on all of those and they're at various stages of in-flight / complete. As an example, Policy Documents should let you do prefix-based matching for GCS: https://cloud.google.com/storage/docs/xml-api/post-object#policydocument https://cloud.google.com/storage/docs/xml-api/post-object#po...
- benbro 7y agoIt seems that Policy Documents only work for uploads but I'm talking about downloads.
- rubyn00bie 7y agoMore opaque pricing... awesome. As someone who just setup services on Google Cloud, I could not be more disappointed and outraged at their billing and performance. It's outrageously high for even small services (and I'm comparing it to Heroku of all places), and the documentation is even worse. Yes, there are examples but the docs are outdated, and make it almost impossible to relate what you're paying to what you're doing until you get the bill. The $300 credit promo they offer is a joke, it's not $300 in the sense you'll get to try it out, it's that you're likely to rack up at least $300 is bullshit charges before you're even aware...
- ik8s 7y agoI wonder if they will make these available for GKE node pools at some point; sounds like being able to autoscale with these would make sense.
- amq 7y agoThey should be available to GKE as soon as they are available for the usual VM instances. If you can't launch a node pool, I bet you also can't launch a VM.
- dmix 7y ago> Performance-aware live migration Does this mean your VM getting dynamically migrated to a new server as performance issues start happening? Sorry if it’s a silly question, I’ve never dug into how VPS stuff works in practice.
- maxdo 7y agoGoogle cloud pricing and prediction is a complete mess I’m moving away from gcloud all our instances just because of this reason. Their billing prediction can jump up/down 1000% in few days with no use change. And they don’t dare to say even sorry for that. But yeah they will invite Gwen Stefani and will drive you to Alcatraz spent tons of money instead of hiring engineers who can calculate basics for billing. Their CEO will tell a fairy tail about best AI for billing... and after one year it doesn’t work at all. I just don’t feel I’m ok with this customer approach and priorities.
- londons_explore 7y agoI'm imagining the average workload within GCP VM's to be 95 percent idle time. From oversized VM's, to machines sized for peak loads, to machines where the developer has just used a standard machine size for a 3 seconds per week cron job, to machines that are forgotten about and idle, to machines spun up as a hot spare, to machines part of build infra which are idle between builds and every weekend. There's a lot of idleness. If machines really are idle 95 percent of the time, why is the price only discounted 30%?
- qeternity 7y ago> If machines really are idle 95 percent of the time, why is the price only discounted 30%? Because that's apparently what Google believe the market will bear.
- londons_explore 7y agoI see these machine types have a virtio balloon memory driver so the host can reclaim memory from the VM. What's at it for me financially to allow that? Why should I give up memory I've paid for unless I get a discount/refund? That memory will be useful even as caching of disk pages, so giving it up is making my application slower for no financial benefits.
- remus 7y agoThat's why these instances are 30% cheaper.
- londons_explore 7y agoYeah, but I could just unload that balloon driver and get to keep all my ram all the time while still paying 30% less?
- amq 7y agoStrangely, the E2 type seems to be available when checked with "gcloud beta compute machine-types list", but not with "gcloud beta compute machine-types list --zones". Launching also doesn't work.
- paule89 7y agoCan somebody help me figure this out. I want a VPS, 2 cores 2-4gb of ram in europe. How much would it cost per month? Also how much does storage cost? And if i were to say put a minecraft server there. How would it be able to dynamically ramp the machine up and down if needed? Only via the interface? or after trying to connect to a specific port? I am not the typical target audience for these kind of server deals. But i want my small cheap server for myself.
- rat9988 7y agoYou won't find a better deal than hetzner. I have my production server on their cheapest vps :) Ovh is quite good too.