In this session, we look into how you can get started with Amazon EC2 Spot Instances to better optimize your costs. We also cover best practices to ensure success with Spot.

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Carlos Rueda– ruecarlo@amazon.com
Specialist Solutions Architect – EC2 Spot
May 2019
Amazon EC2 Spot Instances

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Amazon EC2 purchase options
Spot Instances
Spare EC2 capacity at
off On-Demand prices
Fault-tolerant, flexible,
stateless workloads
Reserved Instances
Make a 1 or 3-year commitment
and receive a off
On-Demand prices
Committed &
steady-state usage
On-Demand
Pay for compute capacity
with no
long-term commitments
Spiky workloads,
to define needs

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Spot is easy
Price changes infrequently based on long term supply
and demand of spare capacity in each pool
independently
Just request capacity and pay the current rate. No
Bidding
Interruptions only happen when OD needs capacity. No
outbidding

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Large customer base

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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

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Is my workload Spot Ready?
Stateless Fault-Tolerant Flexible: Multi-
AZ and Instance
Flexibility
Loosely Coupled
Looks familiar?

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Containers + Spot = match made in heaven
Skyscanner is a travel fare aggregator
website and travel metasearch engine
based in Edinburgh, Scotland

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New Pricing Model
No biddingPredictable Prices

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New Pricing Model
New smooth pricing
November 2017

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$0.27 $0.29$0.50
1b 1c1a
8XL
$0.30 $0.16$0.214XL
$0.07 $0.08$0.082XL
$0.05 $0.04$0.04XL
$0.01 $0.04$0.01L
C4
$1.76
On
Demand
$0.88
$0.44
$0.22
$0.11
EC2 Spot pools – instance flexibility
Each instance family
Each instance size
Each Availability Zone (64)
In every region (21)
Is a separate Spot pool
R5 M4
C5
I3 M5d
R4 D2
C4

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Monitoring Spot usage – Savings Summary

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What about interruptions?

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EC2 Auto Scaling Groups

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Spot Instance Advisor

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EC2 Spot with Amazon ECS

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Integrated directly into ECS console,
or use CloudFormation, Terraform
ECS creates a Spot Fleet in your account,
Or – use an Auto Scaling Group to bootstrap instances
Autoscaling
ECS service: CPU/MEM, HTTP requests
Spot Fleet / ASG on reserved metric - CPU, MEM
Interruptions are handled automatically via
scripts installed in User Data
ECS: automatically Drain the instance
Spot Fleet / ASG: automatically replace the instance
ECS - Provisioning and scaling

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EC2 Spot with Amazon EKS
• Run a DaemonSet on every worker to catch the Spot interruption and cordon & drain the node
• Use labels to identify Spot nodes (for the DaemonSet, and other purposes – affinity & tolerations?)

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m4.large Spot Instances
m5.large Spot Instances
c4.xlarge On-Demand instances
Availability
Zone 1
Availability
Zone 2
Availability
Zone3
The new ASG
combines purchase
options, instance
types and AZs in a
single ASG
Single ASG
Multiple instance types & purchase options in ASG
https://tinyurl.com/NewASGblog

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Main takeaways for success with Spot
• Be instance type agnostic and let ASG/Fleet provide the required capacity at the lowest price
• Adopt Launch Templates to benefit from new ASG and Fleet features
• New instance families generally have higher interruption rates
• Architect for fault-tolerance to be Spot compatible and increase your availability

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EC2 Spot instance Workshops:
https://ec2spotworkshops.com
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