Skip to content

All posts tagged “obtainability”

Tag: obtainability

Obtainability, Part 2: The API That Tells You What You Can Get

There's a beta Compute Engine endpoint that answers "can I get twenty Spot VMs of a given machine type in this region right now?" with a number between zero and one, and most teams on Spot have never called it. A working tour of the capacity-advice APIs (advice.capacity and advice.capacityHistory): the exact request, the exact response, and the roles/compute.viewer plus ADC setup that gets you there. Read the per-zone shards, not just the headline obtainability score. The shards tell you where your capacity actually is. Then how to read the number well: these scores are advisory by design, they move between calls, and a score you read as a reservation will steer you wrong at the worst possible moment. Part 2 of the Obtainability series.

Obtainability, Part 1: The Other Half of Scarcity

You went to Spot VMs for the discount and did the homework: checkpoint code, a drain handler, a preemption survived. Then a job sat in Pending for days across three regions and never got a single L4. Scarcity grew a second half. Interruption is losing capacity you have; obtainability is failing to get capacity at all, and you can't checkpoint your way out of a stockout. Part 1 of the series that builds the probe the Compute Fallback Ladder left unbuilt.