
Skylake now GA on GCE - boulos
https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2017/05/Compute-Engine-updates-bring-Skylake-GA-Extended-Memory-and-more-VM-flexibility.html
======
carbocation
The Google Compute Engine is really easy to use, and the browser console makes
it easy to treat it like a Linode or Digital Ocean type host, if that's all
you want.

I recently transitioned off of Linode (after about a decade?!) to Google.
Largely, this was because I needed a lot more disk space to mirror some large
public databases, and it was significantly cheaper to do this with Google than
it would have been with Linode. This is because Linode couples the disk space
with both the RAM and the number of processors. I needed more disk, and would
have liked more RAM, but had no use for more processors.

With this announcement, Google has now decoupled the RAM from the number of
processors, which is a development I'll be taking advantage of.

~~~
bogomipz
>"The Google Compute Engine is really easy to use, and the browser console
makes it easy to treat it like a Linode or Digital Ocean type host, if that's
all you want."

I agree, the browser console is really fantastic. Does anyone know how this is
implemented?

~~~
Goopplesoft
[https://github.com/yudai/gotty](https://github.com/yudai/gotty) is a good
place to start figuring out how they're implemented (tty streaming server +
termjs type thing).

------
boulos
I want to point out that a bunch of things are rolled into this announcement:

\- Skylake is now generally available

\- Broadwell is now globally visible

\- "Extended Memory" custom machine types are now in Beta

I decided to focus on Skylake as GA for the title, but depending on your
interest these other announcements may be good to know as well. In particular,
this changes the historical "us-central1-a is the oldest zone" into "us-
central1-a is a better choice than 1-f".

Disclaimer: I work on Google Cloud (and want to sell you cores)

[Edited: I always forget newlines]

~~~
trevyn
Whoever is setting your bandwidth pricing is preventing me from buying your
cores.

N.B.: My use case is batch jobs that have a significant amount of output
bytes, so I don't care about the "quality" of the bandwidth.

And for those who aren't aware, Google is charging about two _orders of
magnitude_ more than market rates for Internet egress.

~~~
kuschku
For comparison, bandwidth that costs me if I directly peer or rent from a
European hoster 20$ a month costs at GCP over 900$ a month. With Firebase,
it'd be a major 5-digit sum even.

~~~
manojlds
So it would be a huge no no if I have part of my data pipeline in GCE with
rest in AWS.

------
andybak
I love a couple of inexplicable acronyms in the morning.

EDIT - mods - any chance of a title edit? Search engines would appreciate that
as much as humans.

~~~
matt4077
Speaking of search engines: why don't you just look up acronyms you don't
know? The one-time inconvenience would seem to be much better than denying
everyone the benefit of using acronyms (as demonstrated by their use). And
what's the standard for acceptable acronyms? Is it "GA" or "GCE" you don't
know? What about GPU, CPU, FLOP, CIA? And why only acronyms? Surely, some
people will have to figure out what "Skylake" is, as well. And considering
nobody is born speaking English, should the title include some sort of
explanation of "now" that starts from first principle?

~~~
andybak
It's about good writing and judging your audience.

You can safely bet anyone here will know what CPU stands for. But this title
is just badly written and lazy. I actually managed to figure it out after a
couple of seconds of staring but the point is - _I shouldn 't have to_.

------
drej
I really love Google's UI, it's miles ahead of AWS (though kudos on Lightsail,
they nailed that one), but last time I tried porting my toy projects, I was
stopped by Google's requirement to be a registered business. Is that still a
limitation, or can anyone sign up these days?

~~~
ameliaquining
That unfortunate limitation applies only to European customers. The reason for
it is that they don't charge VAT and customers are responsible for their own
tax liability, which wouldn't fly if they were selling to consumers instead of
to businesses.

------
rsynnott
Beaten Amazon to it, then. c5s are still mia.

~~~
boulos
Yeah, it's one of the benefits of being attached to "the rest of Google". As
with Broadwell, Google was front and center in helping Intel qualify this
part. The distinction is that with Skylake the lead time over general
availability was even longer (see our announcement of this at Supercomputing
in November).

We still have some things on Skylake we're going to do beyond today's
announcement, so today is really "Welcome!".

Disclaimer: I work on Google Cloud.

------
anonfunction
Any idea when these will be available for GKE users? I would love to spin up a
node pool to compare but it seems unavailable:

    
    
      $ gcloud container node-pools create skylake --cluster montana --image-type gci --machine-type n1-standard-4 --zone us-central1-b --min-cpu-platform "Intel Skylake"
      ERROR: (gcloud.container.node-pools.create) unrecognized 
      arguments:
        --min-cpu-platform
        Intel Skylake

~~~
dman
I cant use skylake using the console.cloud.google.com website either.

~~~
boulos
See my reply (I was at dinner).

~~~
dman
Thanks for the information and for being so responsive!

------
spo81rty
With all the craziness of different CPUs and server configs... just makes me
want to hurry up and go serverless!

~~~
boulos
That's why we didn't do this with machine types. If you don't care, you don't
have to. If you care, ask for a particular CPU platform (or newer). Most
people won't and probably shouldn't care, but Skylake is enough of a jump that
we finally are giving people the explicit ability to choose.

Disclosure: I work on Google Cloud.

~~~
euyyn
> Skylake is enough of a jump

Can you give more details about this?

~~~
boulos
Both clock-for-clock and even more strongly for applications that can take
advantage of AVX-512, Skylake can be a lot faster than either
Haswell/Broadwell. Like the jump from Sandybridge/Ivybridge to
Haswell/Broadwell, the jump to Skylake is a big one. For now the best
comparisons are going to come from independent sources like Anandtech and
hopefully from customers running their actual code on Skylake and publishing
the results.

~~~
codinghorror
I mean it is no Kaby Lake ;)

------
Elect2
The pricing of the new "extended memory" stopped me from using it.(For a
committed use case)

Still waiting for the AWS c5 instance: [https://aws.amazon.com/about-
aws/whats-new/2016/11/coming-so...](https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-
new/2016/11/coming-soon-amazon-ec2-c5-instances-the-next-generation-of-
compute-optimized-instances/)

------
nodesocket
Dear Google,

I know this may be a rare use-case, but is it possible to allow creating VM
instances with more than 13GB of memory and only two cores?

I'd like to do 2 cores and 24GB for example.

Also, my project's are not seeing the new UI changes (cpu platform and extend
memory), is this still rolling out?

~~~
boulos
Yeah, still rolling out.

As for extended memory, as I clarified elsewhere, while you _can_ make a 2x24
it won't be saving you money compared to having the cores. I forget if this is
made clear in the docs, but via the API this is laundered through machine
types as custom-2-24000-ext.

------
dman
I dont have the ablity to select cpu type from the GUI. Is that being rolled
out gradually?

~~~
boulos
Yeah, like all other rollouts the console rollout is gradual. Sorry about the
confusion.

------
rotten
Can I modify an existing instance (and reboot to pick up the new cpus), or do
I have to build a new instance to get these?

~~~
hanany
Yes, you can do that from the gcloud command line tool. Instructions here
[https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/instances/specify-
min-...](https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/instances/specify-min-cpu-
platform)

------
krzrak
> Skylake now GA on GCE

What now what on what?

~~~
_asummers
Intel Skylake Processors now General Availability on Google Compute Engine.

~~~
krzrak
> Intel Skylake Processors now General Availability on Google Compute Engine.

That's a great idea for a title of this item :)

------
foobarbazetc
RAM limit is still too low for big RDBMSes. I guess this is host machine
limitsd.

~~~
manigandham
455GB is too low?

------
kierank
Does this have AVX-512 available?

~~~
boulos
Yep! Explicitly called out in the blogpost.

