Why Google’s Answer to AWS Reserved Instances is a Big Deal
This is in sharp contrast to what Amazon offers with RIs — pre-purchasing instance types, which have specific characteristics like “nice network instances” or “GPU instances” or “great storage instances”. Thus with Amazon you’re pre-purchasing a pre-set configuration of CPU/RAM/IOPS/Network/GPU/Disk characteristics with only minimal flexibility (mostly around EBS), and your mobility to other pre-set configurations is severely limited. So you better be damn sure you made the right choice, because you’re living with it for 1–3 years.
.. Google is able to offer this due to the unique nature of Google Cloud. Google Compute Engine under the hood is NOT a service that sells a bunch of VMs running on specific hardware. Compute Engine is an opinionated, living and breathing supercomputer, continuously carving out resources for its clients in the most optimal fashion
.. Do not discount (no pun intended) the technical complexity here. These problems are very very hard. As Eric Schmidt has said, Google’s poured $30 billion dollars over the past three years on this bonfire, and it shows. In the end, users win!