[obulpathi]

GCE is less expensive than AWS even with AWS's long-term contracts. If you pay money upfront (losing the interest) and reserve instances for 3 years, then you can beat GCE prices by a small margin. But, if you take into consideration of interest on upfront capital expense, lost flexibility due to reserved instances, cloud cost cuts, GCE beats AWS even with the 3-year commitment. We go to Cloud because Cloud gives us agility and enables us to create infrastructure in a matter of minutes without any constraints (Imagine singing up a contract with your electricity company agreeing that you will consume the electricity for TV for 3 years on a 24x7 basis. That what reserving capacity looks like). Reserving capacity does not belong to the age of Cloud, it belongs to the age of data centers.

[elsurudo]

> Reserving capacity does not belong to the age of Cloud, it belongs to the age of data centers.

Nice, I really like that way of putting it. The promise of the Cloud is, indeed, that it is supposed to abstract you from that, but Reserved Instances reveal what is actually happening behind the curtain.

[obulpathi]

Yep, that's true. Capacity planning and reserving capacity should be taken care by the Cloud provider and users should be free to spin up and down the resources as and when they need them.

[slaman]

This is still the case, but I don't see the harm in offering the ability to reserve an instance for a discount. I prefer GCE's automatically applied discounts to AWS's reserved scheme, but there are plenty of cases where you will need both flexible capacity and have predicted use.

k8s master, or any number of internal tools.

[obulpathi]

> I don't see the harm in offering the ability to reserve an instance for a discount.

There is no harm with the discount. The harm is only with lock in. Once you reserve instances, you can not change the type (different CPU / memory ratio), region or the number of instances. Once you reserve, you have to pay for your instances 24x7, whether you use it or not. If you require more capacity than reserved, you need to pay the full rate. If you require less capacity, then you need to pay for the unused capacity. You don't have all these headaches with Google Cloud pay per go and automatic discounts. You simply use as many resources as you want and you get the discounts automatically.