Working with pre emptive VMs on Google Compute Engine

Question

I'm trying to work with multiple Pre-emptive VM instances on Google Compute Engine for elastic search service and facing some doubts as follows:-

1. Is 30sec window enough to store data from a preemptive elastic search instance to a stable VM?

2. How to save the state of one VM that is ending and restore it to other?

3. Is there an alternative to Google Autoscaler?

Answer 1

You could try running a 'shutdown-script' to create a snapshot with the command:

gcloud compute disks snapshot [disk_name] --zone=[zone] --snapshot-names=[snapshot_name]

Although you should manage to have different snapshot names. Using this you would have a backup of the current VM state, but there is no automatic way to create another VM from this snapshot when is created.

As far as I know there is no predefined alternative that do the same as the autoscaler. Although you could also try using the shutdown script to starts a VM.