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Comment by boulos | Hacker News Reader

(Disclosure: I work on Google Cloud and contributed to this effort).

As I said back in November [1] for our initial announcement, the most exciting thing (for me) is that we let you mix and match cores and GPUs. You can see that spelled out in a nice table in the docs [2].

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12963902

[2] https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/gpus/

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Sorry for being off-topic: can you guys consider introducing something similar to AWS's free tier? It doesn't have to have a lot free resources but it should be lengthy (6+ months, ideally at least 1 year). I recently started a new project, and while I'd prefer to use GC, I had to go with AWS because they offer one year for free (and GC's 2 months is not nearly enough to validate an idea).

That's valid feedback. GCP's free tier is more valuable and more flexible than AWS, but only for 2 months instead of 12.

There are also perpetual free tiers for several GCP services - AppEngine, BigQuery, Firebase.

No comments on your specific feedback, but please do join GCP NEXT March 8-10 for some exciting updates [0].

(Work on Google Cloud, NOT in marketing :))

[0] https://cloudnext.withgoogle.com/

Cloud Datastore has a perpetual free tier, too: https://cloud.google.com/datastore/ :)

(I work on it.)

Thanks, I forgot.. there are probably others I'm missing :/

no livestream?

they should have one up closer to the date.

The tricky part of a 2 month free trial is that it's not nearly enough time to explore the offerings unless you're a company that's already got a product ready to go and staff to migrate it full-time (and I assume the latter is exactly who you'd want to charge full price to). I took advantage of the 2-month GCP free trial, and ended up using 1 GCE instance, 2 Cloud Storage buckets, your cloud storage webhosting & DNS, and....that's it. I don't even really know what other services exist. It takes time to program things...by the time you get around to realizing that there are other GCP services that may help your project, the trial's already over.

Since there's a dollar cap as well, I don't see the problem with extending the trial out to a long calendar time-period.

Anyway to get a discounted Cloud Next ticket? I'm here in San Francisco, but even the $549 (one-day) is out of budget. Would really love to go. I am a GCP user and have a ops/devops consultancy startup (https://elasticbyte.net).

You should really reevaluate whether you should use an entire 6 months to validate an idea. That's a lot of sunk time.

To each her own! The most common issue is that you have some idea you start working on (T=0), put it away for a while (T=3 months), and come back to realize your free trial has expired. Alternatively, if you're just tinkering in the background or on weekends, 60 days is suddenly just 9 weekends.

What if you have one idea, and then another one 6 months later?

A product like ours (ML based medtech) takes a lot longer than 6 months to validate - and we make extensive use of GPUs (both AWS and Google)

Ideally perpetual free tiers are the best, especially their usage becomes a rounding error.

Oh I love it!

I'm designing the distributed backend for my Deep Learning startup now (https://signalbox.ai), this is going to be great. Awesome work!

What type of architecture are you using? We're starting to set up a distributed backend at http://www.bugdedupe.com, and there don't seem to be a lot of resources out there about how to do it right.

I wrote it myself, IPC is shared memory, RPC is Thrift, but this is really just metadata, with a lot of wrangling for performance.

I was excited when I read that Google would offer both NVIDIA and AMD GPUs in the November announcement[1]. Is there any timeline on when AMD GPUs will show up ?

[1] https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2016/11/announcing-GPUs...

As I said below, "Soon" (and the page says so). You might want to attend Google Cloud NEXT [1], with most of your ticket price being turned into credits for Cloud usage :).

[1] https://cloudnext.withgoogle.com/

Can you explain how this is done? Does this mean that VM and the GPUs can be on different host machines? Will it affect the GPU-CPU communication performance?

Sounds like if you max the GPUs per CPU core they have CPU cores "left over" that they then use for CPU-only instances, instead of splitting a host to a predefined pattern of just GPU instances that use up all the CPU as well.

Yep!

You guys should talk (internally) to Zync and offer redshift and octane rendering on your infrastructure!

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