Amazon EC2 Spot Instances enable you to use spare EC2 computing capacity— capacity that is often 90% less than On-Demand prices. In this session, learn how to effectively harness Spot Instances for production workloads. We explore application requirements for using Spot Instances, best practices learned from thousands of customers, and the services that make it easy to use. Finally, we run through practical examples of how to use Spot for the most common production workloads, the common pitfalls customers run into, and how to avoid them. Speaker: John Pignata - Startup Solutions Architect, AWS

2. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
Save up to 90% and Run
Production Workloads on Spot
John Pignata
Startup Solutions Architect

3. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.

4. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.

5. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
Amazon EC2 purchasing options

6. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
Amazon EC2 Spot Instances

7. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
Spare capacity at scale

8. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
c4.2xlarge c3.8xlarge c4.8xlarge i3.4xlarge
m4.4xlarge c4.4xlarge r4.4xlarge m4.2xlarge
Million core
clusters are
not entirely
new, but its still
a lot of cores

9. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
The simple rules of Spot Instances
Set it and forget it pricing
—no bidding, big savings
Is same as On-Demand
and RIs: Same hardware, same
capabilities, same choice of
instances, same geo footprint
(regions & AZs)
Use diverse instance fleets
to spin up 1MM core
(60k+ instances) clusters
70–90% off

10. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
Handling interruptions
Spot is optimized for stateless,
fault-tolerant, or flexible workloads.
Any application that can can have part
or all of the work, paused and resumed
or restarted, can use Spot.
Over 95% of the instances were not
interrupted in the last 3 months
Check for 2-minute instance termination notice via instance
metadata or CloudWatch metrics and automate by:
☑ Checkpointing
☑ Draining from ELB
☑ Using stop-start and hibernate to restart faster
The work you are doing to make
your applications fault-tolerant
also benefits Spot

11. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
Amazon EC2 Spot integrations
Auto
Scaling
AWS
Batch
Amazon
EMR
AWS Data
Pipeline
Amazon Elastic
Container Service
AWS
CloudFormation
Amazon Elastic
Container Service
for Kubernetes
AWS Thinkbox
Deadline

12. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.

13. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
How customers are using Spot instances

14. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
Managed to achieve more than 50x
performance to the capabilities
of their current datacenter
Saved approximately
80% by switching to reserved
and spot instances
15 regions and
millions of instances,
saving 75-90%
~80% cost
savings
Milk VFX peaked at 130,000
cores while

15. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
Workload example #1
Big data
Amazon
EMR
Unleash your talented data
scientists in the age of data

16. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
Big data reference architecture
Amazon EMR
Master Node
(OD or RI)
S3
EMRFS
Master Fleet
Task Node
(Spot)
Task Node
(Spot)
Task Node
(Spot)
Task Fleet
Instance
Store
EBS Volume
Instance
Store
EBS Volume
Instance
Store
EBS Volume
Core Fleet
HDFS
Instance Fleet
http://github.com/awslabs/ec2-spot-labs/ec2-spot-emr
Core Node
(OD or RI)
Core Node
(OD or RI)
Core Node
(OD or RI)

17. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
Workload example #2
Website & apps on containers
Identify new cost-saving initiatives or scale to tens of thousands of instances for different
web services ranging from ad servers to real time bidding servers
Deploy web apps or services on containers and easily manage clusters at any scale at a
fraction of the cost with Fleet
EC2 Fleet and EC2 Auto Scaling can be used with ECS or EKS to run any containerized
workload including a web app
Amazon EC2
Auto Scaling
Amazon
EC2 Fleet
Amazon Elastic
Container Service
Amazon Elastic Container
Service for Kubernetes

18. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
Session State Data
Stateless Web Application on Containers
Amazon EC2
Auto Scaling
ECS
container 1
ECS
container 2
ECS
container 1
ECS
container 2
https://github.com/awslabs/ec2-spot-labs/tree/master/workshops/ec2-spot-fleet-web-app

19. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
Workload example #3
CI/CD
Accelerate your integration and
deployment pipelines, get to market faster

20. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
CI/CD Reference Architecture
Users
https://github.com/awslabs/ec2-spot-labs/tree/master/ec2-spot-fleet-jenkins-plugin
Application
Load Balancer
Jenkins Master
(OD or RI)
Jenkins Master
(OD or RI)
Jenkins Agent
(Spot)
Jenkins Agent
(Spot)
Spot Fleet
Availability Zone B
Availability Zone A
VPC
Jenkins Agent
(Spot)
Jenkins Agent
(Spot)

21. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.

22. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
Amazon EC2 Fleet

23. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
Fleet functionality is
CloudFormation
and Deadline
Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling
ECS, EKS, and Batch
Third-party services

24. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
Save up to 90% using EC2 Auto Scaling and EC2 Fleet
On-Demand Instances
Spot Instances
Reserved Instances
Amazon EC2
Auto Scaling

25. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
Before: Multiple ASGs to use Spot, On-Demand, and RIs together
m4.large Spot ASG Min: 1 Max: 10
m5.large Spot ASG Min: 1 Max: 10
c4.xlarge O-D ASG Min: 1 Max: 10
Availability
Zone 1
Availability
Zone 2
Availability
Zone 3
The old way
with three ASGs
—one for each
instance type/
purchase option

26. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
After: Include Spot, On-Demand and RIs in a Single ASG
m4.large Spot Instances
m5.large Spot Instances
c4.xlarge On-Demand instances
Availability
Zone 1
Availability
Zone 2
Availability
Zone3
The new way
combines purchase
options, instance
types and AZs in a
single ASG
Single ASG

27. 1. Big Data
2. Containers
3. Web Services
4. Grid Computing
5. Rendering
6. CI/CD
http://github.com/awslabs/ec2-spot-labs/ec2-spot-emr
https://github.com/awslabs/ec2-spot-labs/tree/master/ecs-ec2-spot-fleet
https://github.com/awslabs/ec2-spot-labs/tree/master/ec2-spot-eks-solution
https://github.com/awslabs/ec2-spot-labs/tree/master/ec2-spot-fleet-jenkins-plugin

28. Thank you!
© 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
John Pignata
pignataj@amazon.com