Add support for new "Spot" instances

[bo-qeye]

GCP recently announced an evolution of preemptible VMs. They are now called Spot VMs.

More info here: https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/instances/spot

[Burekasim]

Hi @bo-qeye,

When I review the pricing on GCP website, I can see that the spot pricing is the same as preemptible instances.

How do you think we should present the spot pricing in the website? as additional comments? changing the preemptible title to Preemptible/Spot?

[bo-qeye]

Hi @Burekasim

Looking into it, it appears, as you point out, that the price is the same for Spot and preemptible.

Seeing as Spot instances are equal or better to preemptible ones in all aspects, I'm guessing that GCP will discontinue (or quietly phase out) preemptible.

I propose changing the title to "Spot/Preemptible", as you suggest.

[nchicong]

+1
Please add a column for Spot/ preemptible.

[TheKevJames]

Note that Spot pricing is not (or is no longer) the same as) preemptible pricing.

From https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/instances/spot#pricing

Spot prices, the prices for Spot VMs, change over time, up to once every 30 days. Specifically, Spot VMs provide at least a 60% discount and up to a 91% discount on the price of standard VMs with the same machine types.

We would need to scrape currently Spot pricing ~monthly and add an entirely new column, as it is valuable to see standard, preemptible, and spot rates.

Note that the catalog API does now support spot pricing in their results.

[Burekasim]

Hi Kevin,

Thanks for letting me know, when I started working on this website, it took me 4 days until I had to abandon the catalog api because there was no way to get to the same price of gcp calculator.
I will have to review this again. maybe I will start with the spot prices and we will figure out the rest in a later date.

[TheKevJames]

Yeah, I haven't played with the catalog API yet, but it looked... more complicated than I'd prefer...

I notice (some of?) the GCP pricing page docs have been updated to include the Spot pricing as well (and in some cases no longer show preemptible), so there might be some scraping that can be done?

Mostly the important thing IMO is that the Spot pricing changes monthly and varies per-SKU, so #34 might end up being a prerequisite here :(

[gdubicki]

Thanks for letting me know, when I started working on this website, it took me 4 days until I had to abandon the catalog api because there was no way to get to the same price of gcp calculator.

Yeah, I haven't played with the catalog API yet, but it looked... more complicated than I'd prefer...

I also considered using the Catalog API recently, but it was too difficult for my use case, while Infracost API was a pleasure to use, so please check out #36.