Plus bidding on spot-instances used to be far less gamed so if you had infrequent batch jobs (just an extreme version of low-duty-cycle loading), there was nothing cheaper and easier.
I've been out of that "game" for a bit, but Google Compute used to have the cheapest bulk-compute instance pricing if all you needed was a big burst of CPU.
It's all changed if you're running ML workloads though.
Plus bidding on spot-instances used to be far less gamed so if you had infrequent batch jobs (just an extreme version of low-duty-cycle loading), there was nothing cheaper and easier.
I've been out of that "game" for a bit, but Google Compute used to have the cheapest bulk-compute instance pricing if all you needed was a big burst of CPU.
It's all changed if you're running ML workloads though.