Is there a way to get the general availability of a certain predefined machine type for spot vms?

[ryanmarten]

Let's say my task is embarrassingly parallel and I have set parallelism to 1,000. I can run my program twice as fast on a n1-standard-32 than a n1-standard-16, it doesn't really matter to me which one I use, I just want to have the largest of cores in total across of machines available. I am using batch jobs. 

For example:

• there are 1,000 n1-standard-16 and only 495 n1-standard-32 available, I rather use the 16 core machines
• there are 200 n1-standard-16 but 105 n1-standard-32, I would rather use the 32 core machines

The issue is I want to use spot instances, but I don't have a way of telling the available pool of spot instances for each machine type so I can't make an informed decision on this. Is there a way to get this information? 

[ErnestoC · Accepted solution]

It appears that the ability to see the Compute Engine instances available for Spot VMs is not yet possible, likely due to the design for spot VMs where instance availability is not guaranteed. In this scenario, you can submit a Feature Request at the Public Issue Tracker for Compute Engine.