Re:SSDs Have Become Fast, Except in the Cloud
by jsolson on Wednesday February 21, 2024 @11:42AM
(#39456071)
GCE fares a little better than this:
- VMs with SSDs can (in general -- there are exceptions for things like GPUs and exceptionally large instances) live migrate with contents preserved.
- GCE supports a timeboxed "restart in place" feature where the VM stays in limbo ("REPAIRING") for some amount of time waiting for the host to return to service: https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/instances/host-mainten.... This mostly only applies to transient failures like power-loss beyond battery/generator sustaining thresholds, software crashes, etc.
- There is a related feature, also controlled by the `--discard-local-ssd=` flag, which allows preservation of local SSD data on a customer initiated VM stop.
- VMs with SSDs can (in general -- there are exceptions for things like GPUs and exceptionally large instances) live migrate with contents preserved.
- GCE supports a timeboxed "restart in place" feature where the VM stays in limbo ("REPAIRING") for some amount of time waiting for the host to return to service: https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/instances/host-mainten.... This mostly only applies to transient failures like power-loss beyond battery/generator sustaining thresholds, software crashes, etc.
- There is a related feature, also controlled by the `--discard-local-ssd=` flag, which allows preservation of local SSD data on a customer initiated VM stop.