How to use Marketplace Products in Autoscale

[mr_tux]

Hello,

How can I use apps from Marketplace in GCP with Autoscale? I have researched a lot, but I couldn't find any documentation related to this. Thanks in advance. 

[hectorjacales]

Hello, as you wrote, it seems there is not autoscaling section within the offical docs. A workaround I can suggest is to use  Marketplace to launch your apps, then create a VM image as base, similar to this [1]. Then create a VM instance group and enable autoscaling according to your needs[2].

Another alternative is to use a hybrid (semiautomatic) scaling, you can set alerts using Cloud Monitoring[3] and then use Cloud Deployment Manager (and maybe Cloud Functions) to launch the scale operations.

1- Create and start a VM instance  |  Compute Engine Documentation  |  Google Cloud

2- Autoscaling groups of instances  |  Compute Engine Documentation  |  Google Cloud

3-  https://cloud.google.com/marketplace/docs/manage-deployments#managing_your_deployments

[mr_tux]

Thanks for the info. 

So, when the number of instances increases, how will the pricing work? Will it be the license cost of the product from the Marketplace + instance fee? Or will only the instance fee be charged?

[kumards]

Hello @mr_tux ,

Great question! When you create the image any licenses[1] for the marketplace offering get associated with the image, and that license-association carries through to the VM. So the billing for the instance will include the license costs.

[1] https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/reference/rest/v1/licenses

[mr_tux]

Hi @kumards ,

Thanks. 

If we create a Marketplace Image once and then create an Instance from that image, and assign it to an Instance Template, this is correct, isn't it? This way, for each instance opened through the Instance Group, n number of instances will be billed based on the product license, right?

[kumards · Accepted solution]

Right.

After you deploy a marketplace offering, send a GET call to the VM to see the associated licenses:

gcloud compute instances describe VM_NAME --zone=ZONE | grep "license"

Next, after you create a template by using the above VM, send a GET call to the template to see the licenses (same as for the base VM):

gcloud compute instance-templates describe TEMPLATE_NAME | grep "license"

Then, after creating an instance group by using the above template, send a GET call to the VMs in the group to see the associated licenses.

Note: This behavior is for marketplace offerings that are categorized as "paid". For BYOL offerings, you're responsible for buying & managing the required licenses directly from the marketplace vendor. The license costs for such deployments isn't handled through Google Cloud Billing.

Also, please do review the marketplace terms of service that are displayed when you launch the deployment.

I hope this helps.

[mr_tux]

Hi @kumards 

Thanks for the handy information.  In fact, it would be great if the LaunchConfiguration (Instance Template) could be selected as easily as in AWS. I've been searching for this for 2 days 🙂

[kumards]

Glad you found this information helpful, @mr_tux . I've requested (internally) that the Marketplace docs be updated to clarify how billing is done for VMs created by using images that are created from Marketplace deployments.

[mr_tux]

@kumards Thank you. 

I would like to ask another question. If I deploy the Marketplace App with a minimum system requirement of C2-standard-4 and then set up an E-2-medium type instance, how will the billing be handled? There seem to be quite a few discrepancies in this system. 🙂

[kumards]

@mr_tux - You're welcome! I haven't tried the flow that you described. In general though, the billing for the infrastructure (i.e., vCPUs, RAM etc.) would be based on the actual configuration of the VMs that you provision.