Capacity Reservations

Capacity Reservations#

GCP on-demand capacity for newer accelerators (TPU v6e, H100) is not guaranteed and may fail with FailedScaleUp errors. A GCP capacity reservation guarantees hardware is available when your node pool scales up.

GPU Reservations#

GPU reservations can be created directly through the GCP CLI. For example, for a single H100:

gcloud compute reservations create my-h100-reservation \
  --machine-type=a3-highgpu-1g \
  --vm-count=1 \
  --zone=us-central1-a \
  --project=your-project-id

See the GCP reservations documentation for the full list of supported machine types and options.

TPU Reservations#

TPU machine families do not support self-service reservations via gcloud compute reservations create. TPU capacity reservations must be requested through Google Cloud support. Once approved, the reservation name will be available in your project for the specified zone and TPU type.

Using a Reservation with Kinetic#

Once you have a reservation name (from either path above), pass it to kinetic pool add:

kinetic pool add \
  --accelerator tpu-v6e-8 \
  --reservation my-reservation-name \
  --project your-project-id

Kinetic sets SPECIFIC_RESERVATION affinity on the node pool so the autoscaler consumes nodes from your reservation instead of competing for on-demand capacity.

Cleaning Up#

Remove the reservation when you are done to avoid ongoing charges:

gcloud compute reservations delete my-h100-reservation \
  --zone=us-central1-a \
  --project=your-project-id

Note: Reservations accrue charges based on the reserved machine type regardless of whether VMs are running.