[HN Gopher] Google Cloud now lets you suspend and resume VMs
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Google Cloud now lets you suspend and resume VMs
Author : akrymski
Score : 47 points
Date : 2023-03-23 17:08 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (cloud.google.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (cloud.google.com)
| nerpderp82 wrote:
| This is old. Suspension isn't transparent to the VM which reduces
| its usefulness.
|
| > When you make a suspend request, you send an ACPI suspend
| signal to the VM instance. If the VM does not respond to the ACPI
| S3 suspend signal within a couple of minutes, Compute Engine
| cancels the suspend attempt and returns the VM to a RUNNING
| state.
| outworlder wrote:
| Same as AWS.
| https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/instance...
|
| > When you initiate hibernation, the instance moves to the
| stopping state. Amazon EC2 signals the operating system to
| perform hibernation (suspend-to-disk). The hibernation freezes
| all of the processes, saves the contents of the RAM to the EBS
| root volume, and then performs a regular shutdown.
| nerpderp82 wrote:
| I believe under VMWare a suspension is transparent to the OS.
| The hypervisor just stops running the guest.
| cwilkes wrote:
| [ 2022 ]
| outworlder wrote:
| We have been using this feature as 'beta' for a few years now
| with no issues. I've reported some bugs to GCP folks back when it
| was in an alpha state.
| akrymski wrote:
| It's worth noting that Suspend/Resume doesn't work for GPU
| instances.
|
| Surprising given that NVidia has vGPUs capable of hibernation:
|
| https://docs.nvidia.com/grid/15.0/grid-vgpu-release-notes-mi...
|
| "vGPU hibernation is supported on all supported GPUs, Microsoft
| Azure Stack HCI hypervisor software releases, and guest operating
| systems."
| strstr wrote:
| GCE passes through GPU hardware instead of using vGPU. (I
| believe, but not 100% certain this is universal for all GPU
| types.)
| justsomeuser wrote:
| How long does it take to resume a VM?
| badrabbit wrote:
| If only you could take and restore snapshots easily in this
| platforms. I use used nested virtualization with qemu or vbox to
| avoid having service accounts, automation scripts,
| functions,etc...
|
| But this is a great step forward, I have seen (including with
| myself) heavy usage of cloud VMs as workstations.
| Temporary_31337 wrote:
| Checking which year is this as VMWare, Virtual Box etc have
| supported this for more than a decade...
| CobrastanJorji wrote:
| Checking the year is a good idea, as this is an article from
| exactly one year ago today.
| ericpauley wrote:
| Note: AWS has supported this for many years:
| https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-hibernate-your-ec2-inst...
|
| I do wonder how big the use case for suspend/hibernate is in
| practice. Are there that many services that (a) see infrequent
| use that justifies this cost reduction and (b) can't just be
| booted fresh when needed. I could see if there's a lot of
| compute-intensive data cached, but this could also just be stored
| in a disk-persistent cache.
| OkayPhysicist wrote:
| I've used it extensively for hosting the heavily-modded
| Minecraft servers we play with. Those things can take easily
| 5-10 minutes to boot up fresh, as opposed to the very quick
| resume.
| bradhe wrote:
| It's a useful feature in some cases for certain stateful
| workloads (e.g. cloud-based workstations) but it's almost
| always 100% better architecturally to develop systems that can
| just be thrown away and rebuilt vs needing to preserve state.
| ericpauley wrote:
| True. We do a fair bit of cloud-based dev environments and
| I'd be worried about risks from tasks getting paused/resumed
| that aren't well-designed for it. In theory this could cause
| undesirable outcomes but it's probably not an issue in
| practice.
| outworlder wrote:
| > Note: AWS has supported this for many years:
| https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-hibernate-your-ec2-inst...
|
| We have been using GCP hibernation since 2018 too, but it was
| alpha back then. The AWS version also had some limitations (it
| only supposed Amazon Linux at the time) - current prerequisites
| here:
| https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/hibernat...
|
| We have hundreds of developer K8s clusters that get used during
| a normal workday and get shutdown later. Because there are many
| services (each with their own readiness criteria), a cold boot
| takes a long time until all services stabilize (worst case I've
| seen was over 30 minutes). With hibernation they can resume
| where they started off within a couple of minutes. During
| development it's often the case that one may be doing
| experiments and changing the current state, so preserving
| everything is a plus.
|
| If, as it was often the case when it was alpha, hibernation
| failed, then the normal startup procedure would take place.
|
| We don't use it in production but I don't think it's
| inconceivable that there are other use-cases where preserving
| state could shave time in getting resources ready.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| At work we have this for stablediffusion and similar servers, I
| think one runs at .5EUR/h or more. Automatic start and stop
| outside of office working hours.
|
| It even makes sense if you have on-prem bare metal, with
| electricity prices being as insane as they are, you'll notice
| the effect pretty much immediately.
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(page generated 2023-03-23 23:01 UTC)