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Cloud Computing · Intermediate

Spot VMs (Google Cloud)

Google Cloud VMs using excess capacity at large discounts that can be preempted at any time with a short notice.

Definition

Spot VMs offer discounts of roughly 60 to 91 percent off on-demand prices, can be preempted with a 30-second notice and have no maximum runtime, unlike legacy preemptible VMs, which stopped after 24 hours. They suit fault-tolerant batch jobs and stateless workloads.

Example

A genomics pipeline runs thousands of Spot VMs in a managed instance group and retries preempted tasks.

Exam tip

Spot VMs do not get live migration or SLA coverage; never use them for workloads that cannot be interrupted.

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