
Ask HN: Should I spin up and spin down VMs constantly? - talltofu
I was wondering if anyone had any suggestions on what the right &#x27;cloudy&#x27; way of doing things are. Should I spin up a VM on the cloud and use it forever like I do with a physical machine? Or should I constantly spin up and spin down VMs daily? My VMs are stateless.<p>Are there organizations that have chosen one path or the other and have had success? Links to blogs&#x2F;articles would be appreciated
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boulos
You should on GCE, but not on EC2: per-hour billing for EC2 means your 15
minute VM costs you 60 (aka 4x as much). We (sadly) have a 10 minute minimum,
but the difference is pretty stark.

Once they got through some growing pains (rate limits per project), Travis CI
has switched to a 1 VM per build model that they'll probably detail in future
blog posts.

[https://blog.travis-ci.com/2016-04-07-migration-update](https://blog.travis-
ci.com/2016-04-07-migration-update)

Disclaimer: I work on GCE, so of course I want you to use it ;).

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stephenr
The _only_ way AWS is cheaper than other providers is if you take advantage of
the ability to spin up an EC2 instance from an image for just the time you
need it, and spin it down when you don't.

If you're not using AWS, check to see how up/down affects your costs. Some
will still charge you for VM's that are "down", meaning there is limited
benefit (to you directly) to spinning them down.

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talltofu
Thanks Stephen. Are there any large scale AWS implementations that you know of
that spin VMs up and down? Also, besides cost, are there benefits to doing so?

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wave
If you have a stateless architecture, you should use Google's Preemptive VM.
It is cheaper [https://cloud.google.com/preemptible-
vms/](https://cloud.google.com/preemptible-vms/)

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r_groop
r_groop

