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We're using Managed VMs, and can currently serve files from the local disk in the VM (which is a standard magnetic HD), as well as serving from Google Cloud Storage (which is also backed by magnetic HDs). https://cloud.google.com/appengine/docs/managed-vms/

As we're working with large files (high-res geo images) in a latency-sensitive context, we'd like to be able to use Local SSDs with our Managed VMs app (it's okay that the data is not persistent, it just needs to be fast and work with large files). At some point, we may want to use other services that are fast and designed for working with large files (e.g. Blobstore?), but we have a workflow already set up to work with files so it should be easiest to set up a faster file system now. Is it possible to use Local SSD storage with Managed VMs?

Here's info on Local SSDs. They need to be created at instance creation time (for Google Compute instances, which Managed VMs are creating behind the scenes). It looks like Local SSDs can be created via command line, gcloud compute, or an API, but it's not clear where we'd configure any of these things since Managed VMs is doing the instance creation for us. Presumably we'd do this in app.yaml, Dockerfile, or in a gcloud command, but it's not obvious how this would work. https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/disks/local-ssd

Josh
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  • Hello, Sorry to tell you but you cannot use your local (SSD) storage with remote server. If you create an instance of “remote SSD”, you’ll still have a LOT of latency problems. Bottom line: • Invest 1k+ in the SSD on premise (I do 256gb backup for every 1TB of storage) • Don’t ever try to store data in the “storage cloud”. The access time will be sooooo slow. – Jurion Jan 29 '16 at 08:07
  • Sorry if this was unclear, but Local SSDs is a product Google Cloud offers, that attaches a SSD in the same datacenter to the VM. The point of this is to have a (flask) webserver able to do fast modifications to files on disk, and then serve the modified files. Thanks. – Josh Jan 29 '16 at 23:28

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Apologies, this isn't currently available. We don't really let you customize the VM specs, aside from the disk size. If you max out the disk size, you will get the highest IOPS we support. We kicked around the idea of tmpfs, but it's not available just yet.

Justin Beckwith
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