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Google Offers Cheap Cloud Computing For Low-Priority Tasks
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.
cheap cloud computing for customers. called it!
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.
If only I was not using the low-priority cloud compting..
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
You forgot about Google Play selling apps, books, music and video. That wouldn't exist without Android
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.
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.