Comment by tsimionescu

1 year ago

Sure, but the electricity overhead of keeping one host running just to run an idle VM is not as trivial.

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tsimionescu

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littlestymaar  1 year ago

But that's not what's happening: they aren't keeping a full host for you.

Your argument is like saying that a bus traveler costs the gas needed to power the bus, but it's never the case: the bus would be cruising no matter what. And symmetrically the VM host would be up no matter what you did with your instance.

  • tsimionescu  1 year ago

    I'm not sure that's true. Shutting down unneeded hardware seems like a very simple but major optimization.

    • littlestymaar  1 year ago

      You assume that the hardware would be unneeded, but that's a very strong assumption.

      It would be very bad for any cloud provider to leave hosts with only one VM running on it, and you can be pretty sure only very small minority of their park that end up in that situation where shutting down a single VM would lead to a shut-down of the entire host, because it means that the host was vastly under-used in the first place.

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