I have seen various cloud computing services offering a free number of hours per month. What exactly they mean? Are they just clock hours or they have some special meaning?
Cloud computing is billed hourly for each instance (server that you are using).
If your provider offers 48 free hours, you can use this by running a single instance for 48 hours, or two instances for 24 hours (and so on).
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Based on the GCP document Free Tier usage limits
App Engine has 28 hours per day of "F" Instancees.
I wonder does F4_1G type also belong to the free tier of 28 hours per day?
F1 and F4_1G is so different Instance classes
To answer your question, yes F4_1G is also under the free tier offered by Google Cloud Platform. The only difference of the F4_1G to the F1 is in terms of the amount of memory and CPU available to each instance, hence the cost. Here's an example:
F1 would cost $0.05 per hour per instance, while the F4_1G would cost $0.30 (based on the Iowa (us-central1) location). Check this pricing list to know the cost per region.
Therefore, when using F4_1G, you're using x6 of the usual default instance hours. In conclusion, you'll use "24 instance hours" if you run an F4_1G non-stop for 4 hours.
I host a basic web app on Google Cloud Platform, and I've noticed my costs creeping up over the last couple of months. It's really accelerated over the last 30 days (fortunately, on a tiny base - I'm still ticking along at under $2 a day). I haven't added any new functionality or clients in months so this was a bit surprising.
My first instinct was an increase in traffic. I couldn't see anything like that in the App Engine dashboard, but I put in a heap of optimizations and dramatically decreased QPS just in case. No change.
The number of instances hasn't moved around much either - this looks like the most likely culprit but it's still just flat, not growing.
My next guess was that data was accumulating in Datastore (even though the cost chart is filtered to App Engine only, I figured a fuller datastore -> a slower datastore -> more instance time in GAE). There's no chart for this, annoyingly, but I determined the data store size was more or less flat (I have a blunt instrument TTL job that runs daily) and culled it by dropping my retention threshold by 20% just to be safe.
These optimizations were on the 17th, but my cost hasn't moved at all. I considered forex fluctuations (I'm billed in Aussie dollars, all my charges are for frontend instances in Japan) but they haven't been anywhere near big enough to explain this.
Any ideas what's going on? I've clicked through all the graphs and reports in billing but can't reconcile the ~100% growth in cost with a flat or dropping qps, instance count and database size.
Yes! I've seen the same thing on a simple App Engine website running Python 3.7! I've had a ticket open since April 29th and they're not helpful. I saw a step change in frontend instance hours on March 24th with no corresponding increase in traffic. I have screenshots that are really telling but I can't upload them since I don't have 10 reputation points.
There's no corresponding increase in traffic, either in the cloud console or in Google analytics.
What's worse, each day the daily estimate shows I'm be under the 28 hour quota. For example, I took a screenshot that showed after 15 hours I was on pace for 24.352 frontend instance hours for the day (I didn't take one at the end of the quota day since it resets at 3AM)
When I woke up the next morning the billing report showed I was charged $0.00 for frontend instance hours for the previous day, but 3 hours later it shot up to $0.48, which means I used 38.6 frontend instance hours worth.
Somehow, the estimated cost calculation was off by 14 hours. Why have the estimate at all if it has an error that large? When I looked at the minute-by-minute billed instance hours for the hours after taking the screenshot through the end of the quota-day, there's nothing that indicates I would have used 23 additional hours from the time I took the screenshot to the time of the quota reset.
This behavior has been happening every day since March 24th for me with no explanation from Google besides "it looks like you exceeded your instances..." I wish I could share the screenshots so you can compare what you're seeing.
I would like to setup server for 'image processing' activity on my website. What is the comparable power in GAE if I use 'n1-standard-1' instance in GCE? It is because I miscalculated it, or the price difference is substantial between the two for the same power?
App Engine instances are more expensive than Compute Engine instances on a per hour basis. If you have a constant load, it's cheaper to keep a GCE instance running.
App Engine has an advantage that it can scale down to zero instances after 15 minutes of inactivity. If you have no load during long stretches of time (night, weekends) or few requests that come less frequently than ~ once per hour, App Engine instance maybe a more efficient solution.
Also, take a look at Google Cloud Functions. This is a Node.js runtime that is priced to 100 milliseconds. There are no instances to start or shutdown, no ongoing costs at all - you pay only when you process a request. And you get a free daily quota. The only limitation is that an individual request should be completed in 9 minutes.
I have a simple online ordering application I have built. It probably handles 25 hours a week, most of those on Mondays and Tuesday.
Looking at the dashboard I see:
Billing Status: Free - Settings Quotas reset every 24 hours. Next reset: 7 hrs
Resource Usage
Frontend Instance Hours 16% 4.53 of 28.00 Instance Hours
4.53 hours seems insanely high for the number of users I have.
Some of my pages make calls to a filemaker database stored on another service and have latencies like:
URI Reqs MCycles Latencies
/profile 50 74 1241 ms
/order 49 130 3157 ms
my authentication pages also have high latencies as they call out to third parties:
/auth/google/callback 9 51 2399 ms
I still don't see how they could add up to 4.53 hours though?
Can anyone explain?
You're charged 15 minutes every time an instance is spins up.
If you have few requests, but they are spaced out, your instance would shut down, and you'll incur the 15 minute charge the next time the instance spins up.
You could easily rack up 4.5 instance hours with 18 HTTP requests.
In addition to the previous answer, I thought to add a bit more about your billing which might have you confused. Google gives you 28 hours of free instance time for each 24 hour billing period.
Ideally you always have one instance running so that calls to your app never have to wait for an instance to spin up. One instance can handle a pretty decent volume of calls each minute, so a lot can be accomplished with those free 28 hours.
You have a lot of zero instance time (consumed less than 5 instance hours in seventeen hours of potential billing.) You need to worry more about getting this higher not lower because undoubtedly most of the calls to your app currently are waiting for both spin-up latency plus actual execution latency. If you are running a Go app, spin-up is likely not an issue. Python, likely a small-to-moderate issue, Java...
So think instead about keeping your instance alive, and consume 100% of your free instance quota. Alternatively, be sure to use Go, or Python (with good design). Do not use Java.
AppEngine kills my JVM instance really quickly. It does not live longer than 30 seconds idle. Subsequent request will create new instance but this roundtrip takes 8-10 seconds. Is there potential problem (bug) in my application ? There is no record in logs/admin logs which would indicate any problem or reason of shutdown. Development server works normaly. Is there any chance to find out why the instance is shutdown so quickly ?
AppEngine especially on free account can kill the instance anytime. Instance can live couple of seconds if idle or couple of minutes, noone knows how long. Should you need resident instance (to prevent long instance start-up), switch to paid version. Even if it is paid, you can still run it for free if you keep your instance hours within free quota. This means if you have single F1 instance, it will consume 24instance-hours per day. As per today quotas, you have free 28instance-hours per day so you have 4 instance-hours spare for app redeployments (every redeployment costs 1/4 of instance-hour or 15 minutes). Having F2 instance will consume quota 2x faster e.g. it will take 14 hours to consume your 28hour free quota. Next 10 hours will be billed to your credit card as per price list.