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Are there any providers that will only charge for 2 hours a day of computation? As far as I can tell from reading the various literature, Azure, EC2, and GAE will all charge for as long as the code is deployed to an instance, whether it is actually doing anything or not. I suppose this would work if we could automatically switch on an instance on a scheduled basis, and allow it to terminate itself once it's complete... But I can't find anything that allows this.
We have a procedure that looks like this:
We're looking to run this in such a way that it does not require any manual intervention. So every day, we would need at most 2 hours of CPU time. We'd love to host this somewhere that maximizes the efficiency of being idle for 22 hours out of each day (and charges accordingly).
Is there anyone that offers such a service?
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For self-serve Cloud Billing accounts, your Google Cloud costs are charged automatically in one of two ways: Monthly billing: Costs are charged on a regular monthly cycle. Threshold billing: Costs are charged when your account has accrued a specific amount.
A stopped instance does not incur charges, but all of the resources that are attached to the instance will still be charged. For example, you are charged for persistent disks and external IP addresses according to the price sheet, even if an instance is stopped.
There are four main types of cloud computing: private clouds, public clouds, hybrid clouds, and multiclouds. There are also three main types of cloud computing services: Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), Platforms-as-a-Service (PaaS), and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS).
The cluster management fee of $0.10 per cluster per hour (charged in 1 second increments) applies to all GKE clusters irrespective of the mode of operation, cluster size or topology. The GKE free tier provides $74.40 in monthly credits per billing account that are applied to zonal and Autopilot clusters.
Windows Azure exposes the management of applications (services) using a REST based API (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee460799.aspx). You could write your own code using this REST API to manage your deployments. There are both commercial (Cerebrata Azure Management Cmdlets) and free (Windows Azure Platform PowerShell Cmdlets) tools available which can help you automate your deployment tasks.
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App Engine has the Cron Service which can issue a request at a particular time of day. You could then use Task Queues to actually perform the work.
The only drawback is that tasks must complete within 10 minutes, which means you'd have to break up your processing into discrete chunks that can each finish in less than 10 minutes.
Unlike Amazon et al, App Engine doesn't charge based on time, it charges based on actual usage (e.g. number of queries per second you're processing, number of bytes used, etc).
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