Using Google Compute Engine can give your company the kind of powerful infrastructure that Google uses in their own operations without you having to do any of the setup work, thanks to the magic of cloud computing. Such powerful infrastructure, of course, comes at a fairly high price. Although the market rate for using Google Compute Engine is fair, it simply isn’t practical for some smaller companies. Such companies may not need the full power of Google’s cloud infrastructure, or may simply find that the operating costs for it are not sustainable in their budget. These companies may not be able to harness the full power of Google Compute Engine, but they do have an option besides turning to the competition. They have the option to use preemptible virtual machines, a far cheaper variant of Google’s usual cloud platform, with a narrower focus and fewer capabilities, that just got even cheaper.
Google’s preemptible VMs are receiving a huge price cut – up to 33% off current rates on most jobs, on a product that can already get as low as 20% of the cost of Google’s traditional cloud services. Preemptible VMs are exactly what they sound like – virtual machines that are earmarked for mass sharing, meaning that work on them will be a bit slower than normal, and frequently interrupted. Workloads for each client are distributed across a large number of these VMs, making them ideal for file tasks, but not so much as traditional workstations. Thanks to Google’s optimizations, however, the servers hosting these VMs does not have to bring one job to a full stop to begin another, which means that workloads can still finish with almost no customer input.
While preemptible VMs aren’t a great back-end for things like streaming services, user-facing workloads like databases, and user spaces, things like web hosting, file work, media encoding and other workloads that don’t need to be fluid and aren’t particularly volatile can find a good home on Google’s dirt-cheap preemptible VMs. Even more exotic workloads, like processing satellite images and compiling engineering project data are also possible, with a bit of creativity and the use of a few thousand of these VMs. If you’ve been on the fence about using Google Compute Engine for your company because of price, now may be a great time to give it a whirl. Head through the source link for more details, including how to set up your own claim on some VM time.