Google Cloud today launched Its Suspend/Resume feature lets virtual machines into a state of general availability. Before launching this feature as alpha a few years ago, developers had the only option to stop and start versions. With Pause / Resumethe experience is more like closing and opening the lid of your laptop, argues Google.
While the instance is suspended, you don’t have to pay for the cores and RAM it normally uses. Instead, you only pay the storage cost of instance storage. Google notes that operating system licensing may also be reduced.
Other clouds offer similar features, although Google argues that’s because it sends the standard ACPI S3 signal – that’s also the signal your operating system sends to your desktop or laptop computer. to put it to sleep and suspend with RAM – its solution is compatible with a wider range of OS images. Indeed, it encourages developers to try it out with undocumented custom OS images, as they can work just as well.
Google also argues that their solution is different because the storage for the image is dynamically provisioned when a virtual machine is suspended and does not depend on the startup disk. This means you don’t have to worry about running out of space on your startup disk and the suspended instance will consume less space. While it is suspended, the instance IP address remains in place, and when the instance is resumed, the memory is simply moved back from cache to instance memory and the next cycle customary.
However, you can only suspend an image for up to 60 days. Then it will end automatically. It should be noted that Pause/Resume also does not work for GPU instances, instances with more than 120 GB of memory, E2 instances and Secret virtual machine. The free versions may be suspended, but there is a risk that they will be terminated during the suspension.
But the advantage here is not only cost savings. A system like this also means that you can keep several instances idle for rapid horizontal scaling as needed. After all, licensing a new virtual machine can take a while. If that’s your use case, switching to serverless might be the way to go in the future, but it’s a long-term project while a system like this can help in the meantime.
Some companies are also using Suspend/Resume for their developer environment, which usually doesn’t need to run 24/7. Aaron Humerickhouse, Director, Engineering at BigCommerce explains: “Using Compute Engine’s pause and resume functionality has allowed BigCommerce to reduce operating costs in our Compute Engine-based development environment. “BigCommerce allows each engineer to customize the ‘working hours’ in their environment, triggering a pause at the end of each business day and resume at the beginning of the next day. This reduced our Virtual Machine Instance time from 168 hours a week to an average of 60 hours a week per environment, allowing us to save thousands of dollars per month. We expect these cost effectiveness savings to only grow as our Engineering organization grows. ”
