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Apparently if too many people use a zone, you won't be able to start instances back up.

Starting VM instance Error: The zone does not have enough resources available to fulfill the request

As I'll need to move the instance to a new zone, how do I know which zones are at high capacity so that I may avoid those?

I'm thinking of moving it from us-east1-b to us-west1-b, as the latter has been busy for over 3 hours

Ray Foss
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The information you are looking for is not publicly-available. However, if you know what your needs will be in the longer-term, you can utilize committed use discounts, which will guarantee capacity for you in your zone of choice.

I'll also mention that due to the highly transient nature of many public cloud deployments, instances of resource contention may be very brief, lasting for only minutes perhaps. A corollary of this is that even if you could know which zone is least loaded at one moment, that information has a useful half-life measured in seconds.

EEAA
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  • It's kind of a shame that to keep datacenters profitable, they have to buy servers close to max capacity... with few purgeable slots. You would hope that datacenters/zones are only at 70% capacity so that you can book 10 servers at will... but that wouldn't be profitable/efficient they buy hardware linearly as the demand grows. Which means it takes them days to increase capacity if possible. Still I wish there was a way for them to warn me that "capacity is at it's max and will not soon increase due to space limitations." – Ray Foss Apr 05 '18 at 18:19
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    commitments are for CPU's only, afaik. But it's really the GPU that never seems to be available. Is there a way to gaurentee capacity for a GPU ? – bvdb Aug 08 '18 at 11:03