Run your fault-tolerant workloads cost-effectively with Google Cloud Spot VMs

Modern applications such as microservices, containerized workloads and horizontal scalable applications are engineered to persist even when the underlying machine does not. This architecture allows customers to leverage Spot VMs to access Google’s idle capacity and run your application at the lowest price possible. Customers will save 60 - 91% off the price of our on-demand VMs with Spot VMs. Maximize cost optimization by integrating with Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) Standard and your scalable applications will seamlessly switch to using on-demand resources when Google needs the Spot VM capacity back.

Available in Preview today, customers can begin deploying Spot VMs in their Google Cloud projects for:

• Improved TCO: With a maximum discount of 91% over on-demand VMs, applications that can take advantage of Spot VMs will quickly see these savings add up. When combining Spot VM with our Custom Machine Types and adding on discounted Spot GPU and Spot local SSD, customers can maximize their TCO without sacrificing performance.

• Better automation: Let GKE handle your deployments to seamlessly mix in Spot VMs with your current infrastructure. Automatically scale up when Spot VMs are available and then gracefully terminate when a preemption occurs, ensuring that work gets done with minimal interruptions. 

• Ease of use and integration: Spot VMs are available globally and are a simple, one-line change to start using. The resources are yours until they need to be reclaimed with no specific duration limits. Take advantage of the new Termination Action property to delete on preemption and clean up after use.

Spot VMs are available in every region and most Compute Engine VM families with the same performance characteristics as on-demand VMs. The only difference is that Spot VMs offer a 60-91% discount since the resources may be reclaimed at any time with 30-second notice.

Spot VMs are a great fit for a variety of workloads in a broad spectrum of industries including financial modeling, visual effects, genomics, forecasting, and simulations. Any workload that is fault tolerant or stateless, should consider trying Spot VMs as a way to save up to 91% on VM costs! Getting started is as simple as adding –provisioning_model=Spot to your instance request and savings will begin immediately. 

New dynamic pricing model for Spot VMs

To maximize savings to customers, Google is introducing a new dynamic pricing model that offers discounts from 60% to 91% off of our on-demand VMs. This new pricing model ensures that everyone is getting the best preemptible experience possible by applying a discount to each region based on rolling historical usage for the region. This discount amount may change up to once a month. The discount will always be at least 60% but has the opportunity to move up and down between 60 and 91% off of our on-demand VMs. Customers will also be able to preview the pricing forecast to have visibility to the next pricing change before the new pricing goes live. 

Starting today, we are announcing price drops for these VM families and locations and dynamic prices will begin in 2022.

Preemptible VM instances created through –preemptible will continue to be supported. Preemptible VM customers will not need to make any changes to begin receiving the new pricing. However, preemptible VMs will continue to have a 24h limit. Customers who wish to have no max duration, should switch to Spot VMs to avoid any limits. In order to keep pricing as simple as possible, Preemptibles will follow the same pricing as Spot VMs.

Building on our ecosystem, Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), the leading platform for organizations looking for advanced container orchestration, will also leverage Spot VMs. GKE nodes using Spot VMs are a popular way for users to get the most out of their containerized workloads in a cost effective way. In GKE, Spot nodes can be created by using --spot; preemptible nodes created using --preemptible will continue to be supported. Moreover, starting in GKE v1.21, enable_graceful_node_shutdown is enabled by default to ensure a smooth experience with Spot on GKE. When combined with custom machine types and GKE cost optimization best practices, customers using GKE Spot nodes can achieve even greater savings.

NetApp partnership 

As part of our on-going investment into Spot, we are also strengthening how the GCP ecosystem supports and builds on top of Spot VMs. We are pleased to announce our partnership with Spot.IO to ensure that our joint customers can take advantage of our best pricing ever. 

"Spot.IO is excited about the market-leading combination of savings and predictability of Google Cloud's new Spot VMs. Google's Spot VMs will offer our joint customers more flexibility and versatility in automating cloud infrastructure workloads and create more opportunities to optimize cloud spend while accelerating cloud adoption across micro services, containers, and VM-based stateless and stateful applications." —Amiram Shachar VP and GM, Spot.IO

Get started

Spot VMs are available in Preview now. To get started, check out our Spot VM documentation for a deeper overview and how to create Spot VMs in your project.