The crypto industry is one of the world’s fastest-growing industries, and it’s constantly changing. Demand fluctuation is frequent and rapid, prompting situations where NiceHash would double VM capacity every two months for a year — only to drop back to a minimum configuration without warning.

To handle these demand swings, NiceHash chose Google Compute Engine, which allowed them to quickly scale up or down based on changes in demand. 

And to better control compute engine costs, NiceHash wanted to purchase Committed Use Discounts (CUDs), which provide significant discounts on compute engine resources in exchange for a commitment to use a minimum level of VMs for one or three years. 

However, the fact that processing cryptocurrency requires state-of-the-art hardware meant that NiceHash was not only constantly changing the number of VMs in response to demand changes, but also upgrading to the latest cutting-edge machines as they were released. As a result, NiceHash was precluded from leveraging CUDs because customers must commit to a specific machine type to avail of them.

This prompted the company to seek a solution that would give them the freedom to scale as they needed while ensuring they would pay the best possible prices for compute engine resources.