The team at Zync, walk through a new class of machine that is being offered through the Google Cloud Platform, Preemptible Virtual Machines. These new machines are the same as Google’s standard on-demand cloud machines, but Preemptible Virtual Machines work as excess capacity machines.
This means that they can be purchased at a significantly reduced price than the usual on-demand machines. The drawback is that they can be “taken away” or preempted if they are needed elsewhere.
Although they have some risk involved, you can certainly save a ton of money by setting up some machines as being Preemptible Virtual Machines.
Todd runs through the best optimized settings to use Preemptible Vm’s using Zync in Autodesk Maya, so that you can effectively use Preemptible VM’s and minimize the risk for using them.
It is important to note that Preemptible VM’s work independently of each other. This means that if you set your chunk size in the Zync panel to 1, and you submit to 20 virtual machines, the chance of you loosing all 20 would be really slim. Likely you might end up loosing 1 or 2 at best, or a few at worst.
