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Google Offers Cheap Cloud Computing For Low-Priority Tasks

Posted by Soulskill on from the guaranteed-7-7s-of-uptime dept.

jfruh writes: Much of the history of computing products and services involves getting people desperate for better performance and faster results to pay a premium to get what they want. But Google has a new beta service that's going in the other direction — offering cheap cloud computing services for customers who don't mind waiting. Jobs like data analytics, genomics, and simulation and modeling can require lots of computational power, but they can run periodically, can be interrupted, and can even keep going if one or more nodes they're using goes offline.

59 comments

  1. CCC4C by turkeydance · · Score: 3

    cheap cloud computing for customers. called it!

    1. Re:CCC4C by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Funny

      I want to found the Center for Cheap Collated Commodity-Clustered Civilian Cloud Computing for Cyclic Customer Code Collocation

    2. Re:CCC4C by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      This could be an inexpensive way to host the geocities mirror I made b4 they took it offline.

    3. Re:CCC4C by chuckugly · · Score: 1

      C4 .... oh wait, that one is taken.

    4. Re:CCC4C by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      How about Cheap Cloud Computing for People or CCCP then? It seems like the previous usage is deprecated.

    5. Re:CCC4C by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      3C4C?

    6. Re:CCC4C by davester666 · · Score: 1

      the final 'c' is for cheapskate.

      --
      Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
  2. nice by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    :>nice

  3. Spot Instances? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    Preemptible VMs are the same as regular instances except for one key difference - they may be shut down at any time.

    It sounds like AWS's Spot Instances? Except for the fixed pricing.

    1. Re:Spot Instances? by lgw · · Score: 5, Informative

      It sounds like AWS's Spot Instances? Except for the fixed pricing.

      Yup, it's their version. Forbes compares them. The fixed price is nice on the Google side, but there's no 2-minute warning before termination on Google like you get on AWS, and AWS launched a new Spot Fleet product the same day Google announced.

      Either way, you need to be doing the kind of work where you can lose VMs on short notice and keep going, but it's a very nice discount if you can.

      --
      Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
    2. Re:Spot Instances? by Fwipp · · Score: 5, Informative

      They do give you 30 seconds of warning: https://cloud.google.com/compu...

      Compute Engine performs the following steps to preempt an instance:

      Compute Engine sends a preemption notice to the instance in the form of an ACPI G2 Soft Off signal.
      If the instance does not stop after 30 seconds, Compute Engine sends an ACPI G3 Mechanical Off signal to the operating system.
      Compute Engine transitions the instance to a TERMINATED state.

      So if you're able to persist your state in less than 30 seconds, just watch for SIGTERM and you should be golden. Otherwise, checkpoint frequently.

    3. Re:Spot Instances? by jopsen · · Score: 2

      Either way, you need to be doing the kind of work where you can lose VMs on short notice and keep going, but it's a very nice discount if you can.

      The only problem is availability... Short of maybe database and legacy software... You shouldn't be writing distributed system that can't handle individual node failure..
      So the only thing holding this back is the fact that they don't promise availability and that they can take down all your nodes at once.

      I would argument one ought to run a percentage of ones servers as spot nodes... or preeamable VMs.

    4. Re:Spot Instances? by sydbarrett74 · · Score: 1

      It goes without saying (although I am reminding people) that frequent checkpointing should be done as standard operating procedure.

      --
      'He who has to break a thing to find out what it is, has left the path of wisdom.' -- Gandalf to Saruman
  4. Going back to dumb terminals? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    In a way the cloud was big way back when. I remember in the late 70's my high school had a matrix dumb terminal tied to a couple college servers. It seems we are going back to that way of thinking. Use minimal hardware and let the power of the processing be handled elsewhere.

    1. Re:Going back to dumb terminals? by houstonbofh · · Score: 1

      In a way the cloud was big way back when. I remember in the late 70's my high school had a matrix dumb terminal tied to a couple college servers. It seems we are going back to that way of thinking. Use minimal hardware and let the power of the processing be handled elsewhere.

      It is not about the processing power, it is about the control. However controls the data owns the data, regardless of law.

    2. Re:Going back to dumb terminals? by Zero__Kelvin · · Score: 1

      It's more like using maximum desktop / laptop / handheld hardware and then let even more computations happen on much more massive systems.

      --
      Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
    3. Re:Going back to dumb terminals? by dave420 · · Score: 1

      Cloud computing is far more than just that. What happens when the school wanted more pupils than they had computer power for? Could they magically spin up a new computer out of thin air for the new users to use? Cloud computing is the combination of having your own mainframes/servers, and being able to add to their number/reduce them as close to instantly as physically possible. This lets small players have the same computing power at their fingertips as large companies, which is not the case with the school example you gave.

  5. FIRST POST! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Funny

    If only I was not using the low-priority cloud compting..

  6. Dear Customer by TheRecklessWanderer · · Score: 0

    Google has decided to triple the cost of your off site services. Please send a cheque for $10000 today. We'll keep your data nicely safe and locked away where you can get it as soon as you pay your new ransom I mean SAAS fee.

    --
    Mean what you say...say what you mean.
  7. this sounds familiar by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Batch computing on a mainframe dressed up with today's buzzwords?

    1. Re:this sounds familiar by msobkow · · Score: 5, Insightful

      The cloud has never been anything but old technology with new buzzwords.

      --
      I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
    2. Re:this sounds familiar by Zero__Kelvin · · Score: 0

      Yes. Virtualization of complex computer networks with multiple virtual machines on a single desktop or laptop computer is so 1960s! Do yourself a favor. Until you actually understand the technology, refrain from commenting on it. You'll avoid the case where you broadcast your ignorance to the world.

      --
      Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
    3. Re:this sounds familiar by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Funny

      i know you guys used to have operating systems and a process abstraction. but now i nest operating systems and processes
      layers deep, and went back and added lots of hacks to try to mitigate the huge overheads involved with doing so. but
      since that wasn't enough indirection, i added a container layer on top of all that.

      my container runs on a virtual network which is attached to another virtual network

      none of this runs without a bevy of distributed services that i don't even know about, much less understand

      now i can't say anything about anything, and when it fails i simply shrug

      bow before my awesome power you neckbeard

    4. Re:this sounds familiar by Zero__Kelvin · · Score: 0

      You seem to mistakenly believe that you are saying something different than what I said.You just re-iterated my point. Thanks!

      --
      Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
    5. Re:this sounds familiar by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      That you are a dickhead that doesn't know what is going on?

      Good to have it confirmed!

      (note: different AC)

      PS. since you missed it; the previous poster was using sarcasm to imply you are an idiot.

    6. Re:this sounds familiar by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      You're getting lost in the individual trees and forgetting to view the forest as a whole.

      1965: Room full of computers, networked locally. Users use dumb terminals and offload the processing to the mainframe

      1995: Room full of computers, networked to the global Internet. Users use thick clients that handle most of their own processing, offloading only some to the server

      2015: One Computer in the room that hosts several virtual computers, networked to the global Internet. Users use increasingly dumb terminals that offload more and more processing to the "cloud" (mainframe)

      The terms have changed, and there is increased abstraction of the hardware layer, but the general concept remains the same. The biggest changes have been the speeds of the machines, the network connections, and the number of devices attached to a local network or the global Internet.

    7. Re:this sounds familiar by Zero__Kelvin · · Score: 1

      I didn't know they had HTTPS in the 60s! I stand corrected!

      --
      Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
    8. Re:this sounds familiar by cusco · · Score: 1

      Didn't work with a lot of mainframes, but I know the VAX multi-CPU systems could do that and I would be surprised it IBM and Tandem didn't as well. Of course a "complex" network at that time was half a dozen nodes, but it's a matter of degree rather than a whole new paradigm.

      --
      "Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
    9. Re:this sounds familiar by Coren22 · · Score: 1

      So, because this specific tree that you choose is different, somehow the forest as a whole has changed entirely, lets just call it a field instead.

      --
      APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
    10. Re:this sounds familiar by Zero__Kelvin · · Score: 1

      I was a VAX/VMS Systems manager in the early 1990s, and no, that is not true. For christ sake there was no www and Ethernet was based on Coaxial Cable, with UTP just coming to market, and nobody was transferring complete OS images from machine to machine and running and stopping them on the fly. Period.

      --
      Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
    11. Re:this sounds familiar by Zero__Kelvin · · Score: 1

      Slow on the uptake are we? Most trees changed. It is a different forest. I really would love to send you back to the 60s so you could see how stupid you sound making a different claim.

      --
      Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
    12. Re:this sounds familiar by msobkow · · Score: 1

      Clusters? Been out for decades.

      Virtual machines? Been out for decades.

      Hosted operating systems? Been out for decades.

      Distributed clusters over corporate networks? Been out for decades.

      The only thing "new" about the "cloud" is using the public internet instead of a corporate VPN for the network.

      --
      I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
  8. It will be closed in a year anyway. by alexru · · Score: 0

    So no reason to even try to understand what this is.

    1. Re:It will be closed in a year anyway. by Moof123 · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Google seems to commit to nothing, and everything is rolled out as Beta.

      By time they have the bugs worked out everyone has forgotten it and the buzz is long since gone.

      Other than search and selling ads I am confused as to where they actually turn a profit? Google+ is a dud, Android is given away, Glass cratered hard, self driving cars are years off (and I don't get it), and whatever their Second Life competitor was is gone, etc, etc.

      So is Google just a Search/Ad money machine that can't figure out what to do with its Billions other than make really cool flops?

    2. Re:It will be closed in a year anyway. by Heliologue · · Score: 2

      Throw money at R&D until something sticks. Arguably, their investment in Android has solidified their core search business on mobile, so that's not the write-off you suggest. But like a lot of relatively young companies, Google every so often tries to be edgy and then realizes that it's grown up and has shareholders now.

    3. Re:It will be closed in a year anyway. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Hah! Agreed. I thought for a second this might be neat but then rememebered the other two times they screwed me by deprecating services and APIs I had invested time in learning.

    4. Re:It will be closed in a year anyway. by viperidaenz · · Score: 2

      You forgot about Google Play selling apps, books, music and video. That wouldn't exist without Android

    5. Re:It will be closed in a year anyway. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Making new stuff is wrong? Are we used to the business model of doing nothing except introducing one or two tiny new features that a company actually bothering to make something new gets brickbatted because they can't find immediate profit from it?

      I'll take Google's business model any day, because they make cool stuff and do cool stuff. What other company bothers to do this? HP? Nope. Apple? They just release 2-3 products a decade now and just add new whatzits. Microsoft? Maybe.

      Google actually does stuff that helps everyday computing. A Web browser that actually sandboxes add-ons as protection? What a concept. Working 2FA code under the GPL? Big help for remote Web servers.

      No, Google may not make the cash that Apple does, but they actually innovate, not just market.

    6. Re:It will be closed in a year anyway. by cusco · · Score: 1

      Glass hasn't "cratered hard", just the marketing people misjudged the market sector. It's very much alive and well, and being refocused towards market sectors that are actually interested in its utility, such as medicine, engineering, architecture and spelunking(?). Personally I loathe driving, the day of the self-driving car can't come soon enough for me (although it probably wouldn't let me grossly overload the suspension with landscaping blocks, so I will probably still be stuck driving my truck from time to time.) From "20 years away" in 2010 to 3 or 4 years away now, the advances have been astounding.

      --
      "Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
  9. Re:Don't give a shit. by MobileTatsu-NJG · · Score: 1

    So you're a tech nerd who has an aversion to seeing ads.... Your life must be hell.

    --

    "I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)

  10. Back to the 60s by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    That's what people used to do in the 60s.

  11. Re:Don't give a shit. by Sowelu · · Score: 1

    I dunno, I think those of us who are better at blocking ads than you--and aren't bored enough to spend all their time refreshing large companies' press release pages--might find this kind of article useful.

  12. IDE features by nmrtian · · Score: 1

    I have been programming since vi was considered advanced. I have to admit that features such as builtin debugging and autocompletion are very useful. I program in multiple languages and an IDE which understands the language I am using helps me greatly, especially when it knows about the library. I am more productive because of these tools.

    1. Re:IDE features by Zero__Kelvin · · Score: 1

      "I have been programming since vi was considered advanced."

      We'll need more information to determine how long you have been programming, since you could have started moments before your post based on that criteria. VIM is still one of the best IDEs available (people mistakenly refer to it as an editor; that's like calling a car a windsheild; yes VIM has an editor, but it is much more than that.) Sure, you need to set it up with the right tools (e.g. tag files with cscope or ctags) but that is true of any modern IDE today (e.g. Eclipse)

      --
      Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
    2. Re:IDE features by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Came here looking for a post like yours..... Satisfied the world still has some people who know the right tools :)

      You know you're a Vim nerd when your .vimrc is longer than 5,000 lines and your .vim/ folder is over 100meg.....

      But people with IDEs are jealous of all the things I do with Vim.....

    3. Re:IDE features by viperidaenz · · Score: 1

      You've posted to the wrong article.
      You should be using the Slashdot IDE to cut down on these errors and be more productive

  13. Failure tolerance has long been critical by Chalnoth · · Score: 1

    Small comment on that last point:

    Any large-scale computing implementation must be able to deal with nodes going offline. For example, if typically you have one hour of downtime per machine per year, and are running a process on 10,000 nodes, then at any given time you have about a 64% chance of having at least one node down. If you have to restart the process on all 10,000 nodes, that's going to be a huge amount of wasted computing power.

  14. Book now! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Book now before Google close their new service down!

  15. State of the art from 1985? by awilden · · Score: 2

    Back in the day, you could set your priority on a Cray XMP to 0.01 so that you got 100x the minutes you were allocated but that your code only ran when the machine was otherwise idle.

    1. Re:State of the art from 1985? by Neil+Boekend · · Score: 1

      Indeed, load balancing and shifting is not new. It is, however, important and Google needs it to get maximum profitability out of their servers. To do so people need to know that it exists.

      Google did not claim there had not been other systems with similar load balancing. They simply explained what it was and how to use it. You know, the data you need to know if it is applicable to you.

      --
      Well, I might have a way, but it only works on a semi spherical planet in a vacuum.
    2. Re:State of the art from 1985? by dave420 · · Score: 1

      Could you get access to a second Cray for pennies? And a third? And a fourth? How much did the first Cray cost? That's the difference.

    3. Re:State of the art from 1985? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      No one is calling this state of the art. It is simply a new service offering allowing more flexibility at a greater scale than was available in 1985. This was a great opportunity to show some cynicism though wasn't it?

  16. Economical for Bitcoin mining? by John+Da'+Baddest · · Score: 1

    Or SETI@home. Now we can find out how much it costs to find each Little Green Man.

  17. Perfect match by AchilleTalon · · Score: 1

    Looks like the perfect match to run systemd.

    --
    Achille Talon
    Hop!
  18. Sounds like SETI@home / BOINC model by tpwade · · Score: 1

    It sounds like this is modelled after the SETI@home project (which I think evolved into BOINC?), though maybe in reverse

    Berkeley: Hello, world, you're wasting CPU cycles, do you mind if we use them?

    Google: We've got a bunch of underutilized CPUs. Hello, World, how do you want to use them?

    I suspect the Google model would work better for data that can't be broken into parallel tasks as easily, but overall it sounds like both approaches are designed for similar things.

  19. I like it by tsotha · · Score: 3, Insightful

    This is a really good idea from a resource utilization standpoint. Reminds me a lot of the power grid - you have to have enough hardware to handle the peak load, but idle capacity just costs you money.

    1. Re:I like it by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Yep, which is exactly why this falls under the much more precise term of "grid computing" (sharing resources possibly geographically distributed; ideally with maximum reuse/return on investment based on schedules for workload, etc).

      We have to thank the marketeers for the dilution of the the term "cloud computing" to mean just about anything remotely network-connected.

  20. Amazon does it better... weak by allquixotic · · Score: 1

    Amazon's spot instances are better in every way. Not only are they usually cheaper than Google's fixed prices, but you can run them for way more than 24 hours. I have a Spot Instance running for 4 months at about 1/25th the price of the on-demand instance, and way cheaper than Google's preemptible instance too.

    The limit of 24 hours seems to be designed to prevent people who want to run long-running tasks from using up the spare compute power on something like a VPN. That's fine with me; Amazon can have my business instead. :D