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What would be the most immediately understandable way to present that? Suppose they added new, faster servers in the future; what unit would make the most sense

What would be the most immediately understandable way to present that? Suppose they added new, faster servers in the future; what unit would make the most sense to offer that won't change in the future?

ivalm 6y ago
I mean like other public cloud providers it would make sense to have instances and per minute pricing for an instance. If there is only one instance type that's fine.
- JoshTriplett 6y ago
  What about if there's one instance type, but sometimes that instance gets upgraded so that the same things take less time? Is there a unit that would make more sense than "minutes", and be stable over time? For instance, "time to compile XYZ well-known project"?
  - ivalm 6y ago
    Time to compile is a hard to gauge metric. I’d rather just be transparent that the instance type has changed. It’s presumably in a big standardized DC. They don’t have a continuum of instance configurations, they probably upgrade rarely and systematically. If they are mid upgrade just have 2 instance types available then sunset the older one. Since the upgraded instance is a new instance type it can have new (or same) pricing. In addition, they could publish benchmarks for each instance type if they want. It is literally what we see with cloud providers having v1/v2/v3 names for some instance types.
WindyLakeReturn 6y ago
Probably could just include a * that points to the infrastructure it runs on with a link to the update history of that infrastructure. It only becomes an issue when the infrastructure isn't standardized, but that is just exposing the underlying issue where the same build won't take equal time due to a difference in infrastructure.
nrclark 6y ago
A generic "build credit" term could be better, maybe - with some details about what one credit gets you. Maybe one build-credit is normalized to "One minute on an 'n1-standard-1' with 4GB of RAM and 40GB of storage." Under a system like that, users could maybe choose between a couple of different worker types. Or if there's only ever the one type, periodically the 'n1-standard-1' could be swapped out for whatever is the latest-greatest for the same price.

ivalm 6y ago

I mean like other public cloud providers it would make sense to have instances and per minute pricing for an instance. If there is only one instance type that's fine.

JoshTriplett 6y ago
What about if there's one instance type, but sometimes that instance gets upgraded so that the same things take less time? Is there a unit that would make more sense than "minutes", and be stable over time? For instance, "time to compile XYZ well-known project"?
- ivalm 6y ago
  Time to compile is a hard to gauge metric. I’d rather just be transparent that the instance type has changed. It’s presumably in a big standardized DC. They don’t have a continuum of instance configurations, they probably upgrade rarely and systematically. If they are mid upgrade just have 2 instance types available then sunset the older one. Since the upgraded instance is a new instance type it can have new (or same) pricing. In addition, they could publish benchmarks for each instance type if they want. It is literally what we see with cloud providers having v1/v2/v3 names for some instance types.

WindyLakeReturn 6y ago

Probably could just include a * that points to the infrastructure it runs on with a link to the update history of that infrastructure. It only becomes an issue when the infrastructure isn't standardized, but that is just exposing the underlying issue where the same build won't take equal time due to a difference in infrastructure.

nrclark 6y ago

A generic "build credit" term could be better, maybe - with some details about what one credit gets you. Maybe one build-credit is normalized to "One minute on an 'n1-standard-1' with 4GB of RAM and 40GB of storage." Under a system like that, users could maybe choose between a couple of different worker types. Or if there's only ever the one type, periodically the 'n1-standard-1' could be swapped out for whatever is the latest-greatest for the same price.