Preemptible Virtual Machines

Affordable, short-lived compute instances suitable for batch jobs and fault-tolerant workloads.

Short-lived, low-cost VMs

Preemptible VMs are highly affordable, short-lived compute instances suitable for batch jobs and fault-tolerant workloads. Preemptible VMs offer the same machine types and options as regular compute instances and last for up to 24 hours. If your applications are fault tolerant and can withstand possible instance preemptions, then preemptible instances can reduce your Compute Engine costs significantly.

Predictable and low cost

Preemptible VMs are up to 80% cheaper than regular instances. Pricing is fixed so you will always get low cost and financial predictability, without taking the risk of gambling on variable market pricing.

Expand your computing

Throw preemptible VMs at any short-lived or fault-tolerant workload such as genomics, pharmaceuticals, financial modeling and simulation, rendering, media transcoding, manufacturing design, Hadoop and big data, continuous integration, and web crawling.

Faster batch processing

Supplement your regular VMs with lower-cost, preemptible instances to finish your compute-intensive work more quickly, saving you time and money.

Enable it instantly

Simply add --preemptible to the gcloud command line and you're off to the races. There's no bidding to code for, and with per-second billing, just shut down your VMs as soon as you're done.

// ENABLE PREEMPTIBLE OPTION
gcloud compute instances create my-vm --zone us-central1-b --preem

Features

Simple configuration

Create a preemptible instance simply by flipping a bit via command, API, or developer console.

Easy extendability

Attach GPUs and local SSDs to preemptible instances for additional performance and savings.

Graceful shutdown

Compute Engine gives you 30 seconds to shut down when you're preempted, letting you save your work in progress for later.

Large scale computing

Spin up as many instances as you need and turn them off when you're done. You only pay for what you use.

Quickly reclaim capacity

Managed instance groups automatically recreate your instances when they're preempted (if capacity is available).

Fixed pricing

Preemptible VMs have fixed pricing up to 80% off regular instances. They show up on your bill separately so you'll see just how much you're saving.