Are there any providers that will only charge for 2 hours a day of computation? As far as I can tell from reading the various literature, Azure, EC2, and GAE will all charge for as long as the code is deployed to an instance, whether it is actually doing anything or not. I suppose this would work if we could automatically switch on an instance on a scheduled basis, and allow it to terminate itself once it’s complete… But I can’t find anything that allows this.
Background
We have a procedure that looks like this:
- Every day at 6 am, download some data from a particular website
- Perform a computation on that data. This computation lasts less than 2 hours
- Send (HTTP) the results of that computation to another website
We’re looking to run this in such a way that it does not require any manual intervention. So every day, we would need at most 2 hours of CPU time. We’d love to host this somewhere that maximizes the efficiency of being idle for 22 hours out of each day (and charges accordingly).
Is there anyone that offers such a service?
App Engine has the Cron Service which can issue a request at a particular time of day. You could then use Task Queues to actually perform the work.
The only drawback is that tasks must complete within 10 minutes, which means you’d have to break up your processing into discrete chunks that can each finish in less than 10 minutes.
Unlike Amazon et al, App Engine doesn’t charge based on time, it charges based on actual usage (e.g. number of queries per second you’re processing, number of bytes used, etc).