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Create and use Spot VMs | Compute Engine Documentation

Skip to main content Create and use Spot VMs

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This page explains how to create and manage Spot VMs, including the following:

Spot VMs are virtual machine (VM) instances with the spot provisioning model. Spot VMs are available at up to a 60-91% discount compared to the price of standard VMs. However, Compute Engine might reclaim the resources by preempting Spot VMs at any time. Spot VMs are recommended only for fault-tolerant applications that can withstand VM preemption. Make sure your application can handle preemption before you decide to create Spot VMs.

Caution: Spot VMs are not covered by any Service Level Agreement and are excluded from the Compute Engine SLA. For more information, see limitations of Spot VMs. Before you begin Create a Spot VM

Create a Spot VM using the Google Cloud console, gcloud CLI, or the Compute Engine API. A Spot VM is any VM that is configured to use the spot provisioning model:

Note: You cannot set the automatic restart and host maintenance options for a Spot VM. Console

  1. In the Google Cloud console, go to the Create an instance page.

    Go to Create an instance

  2. In the navigation menu, click Advanced. In the Advanced pane that appears, complete the following steps:

    1. In the Provisioning model section, select Spot from the VM provisioning model list.

    2. Optional: To select the termination action that happens when Compute Engine preempts the VM, complete the following steps:

      1. Expand the VM provisioning model advanced settings section.
      2. In the On VM termination list, select one of the following options:
        • To stop the VM during preemption, select Stop (default).
        • To delete the VM during preemption, select Delete.

  3. Optional: Specify other configuration options. For more information, see Configuration options during instance creation.

  4. To create and start the VM, click Create.

gcloud

To create a VM from the gcloud CLI, use the gcloud compute instances create command. To create Spot VMs, you must include the --provisioning-model=SPOT flag. Optionally, you can also specify a termination action for Spot VMs by also including the --instance-termination-action flag.

gcloud compute instances create VM_NAME \
    --provisioning-model=SPOT \
    --instance-termination-action=TERMINATION_ACTION

Replace the following:

For more information about the options you can specify when creating a VM, see Configuration options during instance creation. For example, to create Spot VMs with a specified machine type and image, use the following command:

gcloud compute instances create VM_NAME \
    --provisioning-model=SPOT \
    [--image=IMAGE | --image-family=IMAGE_FAMILY] \
    --image-project=IMAGE_PROJECT \
    --machine-type=MACHINE_TYPE \
    --instance-termination-action=TERMINATION_ACTION

Replace the following:

Terraform

You can use a Terraform resource to create a spot instance using scheduling block

REST

To create a VM from the Compute Engine API, use the instances.insert method. You must specify a machine type and name for the VM. Optionally, you can also specify an image for the boot disk.

To create Spot VMs, you must include the "provisioningModel": spot field. Optionally, you can also specify a termination action for Spot VMs by also including the "instanceTerminationAction" field.

POST https://compute.googleapis.com/compute/v1/projects/PROJECT_ID/zones/ZONE/instances
{
 "machineType": "zones/ZONE/machineTypes/MACHINE_TYPE",
 "name": "VM_NAME",
 "disks": [
   {
     "initializeParams": {
       "sourceImage": "projects/IMAGE_PROJECT/global/images/IMAGE"
     },
     "boot": true
   }
 ]
 "scheduling":
 {
     "provisioningModel": "SPOT",
     "instanceTerminationAction": "TERMINATION_ACTION"
 },
 ...
}

Replace the following:

For more information about the options you can specify when creating a VM, see Configuration options during instance creation.

Go Java Python

To create multiple Spot VMs with the same properties, you can create an instance template, and use the template to create a managed instance group (MIG). For more information, see best practices.

Start Spot VMs

Like other VMs, Spot VMs start upon creation. Likewise, if Spot VMs are stopped, you can restart the VMs to resume the RUNNING state. You can stop and restart preempted Spot VMs as many times as you would like, as long as there is capacity. For more information, see VM instance life cycle.

If Compute Engine stops one or more Spot VMs in an autoscaling managed instance group (MIG) or Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) cluster, the group restarts the VMs when the resources become available again.

Identify a VM's provisioning model and termination action

Identify a VM's provisioning model to see if it is a standard VM, Spot VM, or preemptible VM. For a Spot VM, you can also identify the termination action. You can identify a VM's provisioning model and termination action using the Google Cloud console, gcloud CLI, or the Compute Engine API.

Console

  1. Go to the VM instances page.

    Go to the VM instances page

  2. Click the Name of the VM you want to identify. The VM instance details page opens.

  3. Go to the Management section at the bottom of the page. In the Availability policies subsection, check the following options:

gcloud

To describe a VM from the gcloud CLI, use the gcloud compute instances describe command:

gcloud compute instances describe VM_NAME

where VM_NAME is the name of the VM that you want to check.

In the output, check the scheduling field to identify the VM:

REST

To describe a VM from the Compute Engine API, use the instances.get method:

GET https://compute.googleapis.com/compute/v1/projects/PROJECT_ID/zones/ZONE/instances/VM_NAME

Replace the following:

In the output, check the scheduling field to identify the VM:

Go Java Python Manage preemption of Spot VM

To learn how to manage preemption of Spot VM, review the following sections:

Handle preemption with a shutdown script

When Compute Engine preempts a Spot VM, you can use a shutdown script to try to perform cleanup actions before the VM is preempted. For example, you can gracefully stop a running process and copy a checkpoint file to Cloud Storage. Notably, the maximum length of the shutdown period is shorter for a preemption notice than for a user-initiated shutdown. For more information about the shutdown period for a preemption notice, see Preemption process in the conceptual documentation for Spot VMs.

The following is an example of a shutdown script that you can add to a running Spot VM or add while creating a new Spot VM. This script runs when the VM starts to shut down, before the operating system's normal kill command stops all remaining processes. After gracefully stopping the desired program, the script performs a parallel upload of a checkpoint file to a Cloud Storage bucket.

#!/bin/bash

MY_PROGRAM="PROGRAM_NAME" # For example, "apache2" or "nginx"
MY_USER="LOCAL_USER"
CHECKPOINT="/home/$MY_USER/checkpoint.out"
BUCKET_NAME="BUCKET_NAME" # For example, "my-checkpoint-files" (without gs://)

echo "Shutting down!  Seeing if ${MY_PROGRAM} is running."

# Find the newest copy of $MY_PROGRAM
PID="$(pgrep -n "$MY_PROGRAM")"

if [[ "$?" -ne 0 ]]; then
  echo "${MY_PROGRAM} not running, shutting down immediately."
  exit 0
fi

echo "Sending SIGINT to $PID"
kill -2 "$PID"

# Portable waitpid equivalent
while kill -0 "$PID"; do
   sleep 1
done

echo "$PID is done, copying ${CHECKPOINT} to gs://${BUCKET_NAME} as ${MY_USER}"

su "${MY_USER}" -c "gcloud storage cp $CHECKPOINT gs://${BUCKET_NAME}/"

echo "Done uploading, shutting down."

This script assumes the following:

To add this script to a VM, configure the script to work with an application on your VM and add it to the VM's metadata.

  1. Copy or download the shutdown script:

  2. Add the shutdown script to a new VM or an existing VM.

Detect preemption of Spot VMs

Determine if Spot VMs were preempted by Compute Engine using the Google Cloud console, gcloud CLI or the Compute Engine API.

Console

You can check if a VM was preempted by checking the system activity logs.

  1. In the Google Cloud console, go to the Logs page.

    Go to Logs

  2. Select your project and click Continue.

  3. Add compute.instances.preempted to the filter by label or text search field.

  4. Optionally, you can also enter a VM name if you want to see preemption operations for a specific VM.

  5. Press enter to apply the specified filters. The Google Cloud console updates the list of logs to show only the operations where a VM was preempted.

  6. Select an operation in the list to see details about the VM that was preempted.

gcloud

Use the gcloud compute operations list command with a filter parameter to get a list of preemption events in your project.

gcloud compute operations list \
    --filter="operationType=compute.instances.preempted"

Optionally, you can use additional filter parameters to further scope the results. For example, to see preemption events only for instances within a managed instance group, use the following command:

gcloud compute operations list \
    --filter="operationType=compute.instances.preempted AND targetLink:instances/BASE_INSTANCE_NAME"

where BASE_INSTANCE_NAME is the base name specified as a prefix for the names of all the VMs in this managed instance group.

The output is similar to the following:

NAME                  TYPE                         TARGET                                        HTTP_STATUS STATUS TIMESTAMP
systemevent-xxxxxxxx  compute.instances.preempted  us-central1-f/instances/example-instance-xxx  200         DONE   2015-04-02T12:12:10.881-07:00

An operation type of compute.instances.preempted indicates that the VM instance was preempted. You can use the gcloud compute operations describe command to get more information about a specific preemption operation.

gcloud compute operations describe SYSTEM_EVENT \
    --zone=ZONE

Replace the following:

The output is similar to the following:

...
operationType: compute.instances.preempted
progress: 100
selfLink: https://compute.googleapis.com/compute/v1/projects/my-project/zones/us-central1-f/operations/systemevent-xxxxxxxx
startTime: '2015-04-02T12:12:10.881-07:00'
status: DONE
statusMessage: Instance was preempted.
...
REST

To get a list of recent system operations for a specific project and zone, use the zoneOperations.get method.

GET https://compute.googleapis.com/compute/v1/projects/PROJECT_ID/zones/ZONE/operations

Replace the following:

Optionally, to scope the response to show only preemption operations, you can add a filter to your API request:

operationType="compute.instances.preempted"

Alternatively, to see preemption operations for a specific VM, add a targetLink parameter to the filter:

operationType="compute.instances.preempted" AND
targetLink="https://www.googleapis.com/compute/v1/projects/PROJECT_ID/zones/ZONE/instances/VM_NAME

Replace the following: + PROJECT_ID: the project id. + ZONE: the zone. + VM_NAME: the name of a specific VM in this zone and project.

The response contains a list of recent operations. For example, a preemption looks similar to the following:

{
  "kind": "compute#operation",
  "id": "15041793718812375371",
  "name": "systemevent-xxxxxxxx",
  "zone": "https://www.googleapis.com/compute/v1/projects/my-project/zones/us-central1-f",
  "operationType": "compute.instances.preempted",
  "targetLink": "https://www.googleapis.com/compute/v1/projects/my-project/zones/us-central1-f/instances/example-instance",
  "targetId": "12820389800990687210",
  "status": "DONE",
  "statusMessage": "Instance was preempted.",
  ...
}

Alternatively, you can determine if a VM was preempted from inside the VM itself. This is useful if you want to handle a shutdown due to a Compute Engine preemption differently from a normal shutdown in a shutdown script. To do this, simply check the metadata server for the preempted value in your VM's default metadata.

For example, use curl from within your VM to obtain the value for preempted:

curl "http://metadata.google.internal/computeMetadata/v1/instance/preempted" -H "Metadata-Flavor: Google"
TRUE

If this value is TRUE, the VM was preempted by Compute Engine, otherwise it is FALSE.

If you want to use this outside of a shutdown script, you can append ?wait_for_change=true to the URL. This performs a hanging HTTP GET request that only returns when the metadata has changed and the VM has been preempted.

curl "http://metadata.google.internal/computeMetadata/v1/instance/preempted?wait_for_change=true" -H "Metadata-Flavor: Google"
TRUE
Test preemption settings

You can run simulated maintenance events on your VMs to force them to preempt. Use this feature to test how your apps handle Spot VMs. Read Simulate a host maintenance event to learn how to test maintenance events on your instances.

Best practices

Here are some best practices to help you get the most out of Spot VMs.

What's next?

Except as otherwise noted, the content of this page is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License, and code samples are licensed under the Apache 2.0 License. For details, see the Google Developers Site Policies. Java is a registered trademark of Oracle and/or its affiliates.

Last updated 2025-08-07 UTC.

[[["Easy to understand","easyToUnderstand","thumb-up"],["Solved my problem","solvedMyProblem","thumb-up"],["Other","otherUp","thumb-up"]],[["Hard to understand","hardToUnderstand","thumb-down"],["Incorrect information or sample code","incorrectInformationOrSampleCode","thumb-down"],["Missing the information/samples I need","missingTheInformationSamplesINeed","thumb-down"],["Other","otherDown","thumb-down"]],["Last updated 2025-08-07 UTC."],[[["Spot VMs offer substantial discounts (60-91%) compared to standard VMs, but they are subject to preemption by Compute Engine."],["You can create and manage Spot VMs using the Google Cloud console, gcloud CLI, Terraform, or the Compute Engine API, with options to define termination actions (stop or delete)."],["Spot VMs are ideal for fault-tolerant applications and are not covered by any Service Level Agreement, requiring users to manage potential preemptions effectively."],["To detect and handle preemption, you can utilize shutdown scripts, system logs, and the metadata server to perform cleanup or save progress before the VM terminates."],["Best practices include using instance templates and Managed Instance Groups (MIGs) to improve flexibility and resilience, selecting smaller machine types, and designing applications to be tolerant of preemptions."]]],[]]

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