Google’s Preemptible Cloud VMs Just Got Cheaper

Companies looking to gain entry into the Google Compute Engine but who don’t have the budget or don’t need the full power of Google’s cloud infrastructure now have a better choice.  They can go with Google’s preemptible VMs, a much cheaper alternative to Google’s typical cloud platform.  And now, they can do so even cheaper.  Thirty-three percent cheaper to be exact!

Preemptible VMs are like any other Google Compute Engine VM, with two big caveats: They cannot run for more than 24 hours and Google can preemptively shut down the VMs if they need the capacity for other purposes. 

The resources for this service comes from the excess cloud capacity that Google might have at any given time in its data centers.  The load in its data centers can vary with location, time and day, where weekends and late evenings generally have the least amount of use.

Google has argued that the model allows the company to use its data center capacity more efficiently while making cloud resources available to customers and passing on the savings at a very cost-effective rate.

"Since launching Preemptible VMs last year, we’ve tuned our algorithms, improved their efficiency and analyzed usage patterns," explained Michael Basilyan, Product Manager at Google.  "Our experience, combined with the growth of Google Cloud Platform, allows us to offer deeper discounts."

As an example, Basilyan said the price of an n1-standard-1 Preemptible VM instance is now just one cent per hour.  That’s 80% cheaper than the equivalent, non-preemptible instance, with no bidding or guesswork involved. 

Basilyan added that preemptible VMs greatly reduce compute costs, and they have come up with lots of interesting use cases along the way.  "Our customers are using Preemptible VMs to analyze data, render movies, process satellite imagery, analyze genomic data, transcode media and complete a variety of business and engineering tasks, using thousands of Preemptible VM cores in a single job," said Basilyan.  And he expects this price reduction for Preemptible VMs will unlock even more computing opportunities and enable customers to tackle even more interesting science and business problems down the road.

Google says they avoid preempting too many VMs from a single customer and, given the choice, preempt VMs that were launched most recently.  While this might prove frustrating to some, the company explains this strategy will help minimize lost work across a customer’s cluster in the long run.  And because Google doesn’t bill for VMs preempted in the first 10 minutes, it saves on costs as well.

If you or your company has been on the fence about using Google Compute Engine because of its price, this might be your opportunity to give it a try.