I am leaning towards Google VM over EC2 because Google offers sub-hour billing. Most of the tasks my code performs use upto 15 minutes, rendering them unsuitable for AWS Lambda and too wasteful for EC2. I need to use the VM as opposed to default app engine as my code depends on linux applications. My goal is to poll my task queue and spin off a new vm for every new task . And kill the VM after the task is completed. edit: typos