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Spot VMs

Affordable compute instances suitable for batch jobs and fault-tolerant workloads.

View documentation for this product.

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Low cost VMs

Spot VMs are highly affordable compute instances suitable for batch jobs and fault-tolerant workloads. Spot VMs offer the same machine types, options, and performance as regular compute instances. If your applications are fault tolerant and can withstand possible instance preemptions, then Spot instances can reduce your Compute Engine costs by up to 91%!
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Predictable and low cost

Spot VMs are up to 91% cheaper than regular instances. You get pricing stability with no more than once-a-month pricing changes and at least a 60% off guarantee.

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Expand your batch processing

Supplement your regular VMs with lower-cost Spot instances to finish your compute-intensive work faster, saving you time and money. Throw Spot VMs at fault-tolerant workloads such as high performance computing, big data and analytics, continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD), rendering/transcoding, and testing.

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Get more from your containers

Containers are naturally stateless and fault tolerant, making them a great fit for Spot VMs. You can run your containerized workloads and node pools on Spot VMs in Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) in order to painlessly and seamlessly recover from preemptions. Simply create node pools with Spot VMs using --spot in your gcloud command and you're ready to go.

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Enable it instantly

Simply add --provisioning-model=SPOT to the gcloud command line and you're off to the races. With per-second billing, just shut down your VMs as soon as you're done.

gcloud beta compute instances create my-vm 
    --provisioning-model=SPOT --zone us-central1-b

Features

Low pricing

Spot VMs are priced up to 91% off regular instances. They show up on your bill separately so you'll see just how much you're saving.

Easy extendability

Attach GPUs and local SSDs to Spot instances for additional performance and savings.

Graceful shutdown

Compute Engine gives you 30 seconds to shut down when you're preempted, letting you save your work in progress for later.

Large-scale computing

Spin up as many instances as you need and turn them off when you're done. You only pay for what you use.

Quickly reclaim capacity

Managed instance groups automatically recreate your instances when they're preempted (if capacity is available).

Control costs

Save even more by specifying a maximum run duration and define how instances clean up after themselves on preemption or exceeding the maximum run duration

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"Businesses rely on LiveRamp to process petabytes of file and streaming data safely, securely and predictably to generate valuable business outcomes. We run tens of Dataproc clusters with thousands of nodes and tens of thousands of cores at a given point of time. We extensively use Google Cloud Spot to reduce our cost and to meet the variability and spikes in customer demand."

Mithun Bondugula, Head of Big Data Infrastructure, LiveRamp

Customers & Partners

  • LiveRamp logo
  • media.net logo
  • spot.io logo

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