This document discusses how to save up to 90% on EC2 costs by using Spot Instances. It provides an overview of AWS EC2 pricing models including On-Demand, Reserved, and Spot Instances. It then focuses on best practices for using Spot Instances, such as using the Spot Bid Advisor, diversifying Spot Fleets across instance types and Availability Zones, and leveraging the two minute warning for Spot termination. Examples are given of customers saving 75-87% on their EC2 costs by using Spot Instances for batch processing, continuous integration, and real-time ad delivery workloads.

1. Getting Started with Amazon
EC2 Spot: Save up to 90%
on your EC2 Bill
Chad Schmutzer, Solutions Architect - EC2 Spot

2. On-Demand
Pay for compute
capacity by the hour
with no long-term
commitments
For spiky workloads,
or to define needs
AWS EC2 Consumption Models
Reserved
Make a low, one-time
payment and receive
a significant discount
on the hourly charge
For committed
utilization
Spot
Bid for unused
capacity, charged at
a Spot Price which
fluctuates based on
supply and demand
For time-insensitive
or transient
workloads

3. Spare capacity at scale
AWS has more than a
million active customers
in 190 countries.
Amazon EC2 instance
usage has increased 93%
YoY, comparing Q4 2014
and Q4 2013, not
including Amazon use.

4. With Spot the rules are simple

5. Capacity pools
AZ1
AZ2
SYD Total Capacity
T2 C4 M4 I2 R3 D2
Shared
Dedicated
Shared
Dedicated

6. $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
C3
$1.76
On
Demand
$0.88
$0.44
$.22
$0.11
Show me the markets!
Each instance family
Each instance size
Each Availability Zone
In every region
Is a separate Spot Market

7. 50% Bid
75% Bid
You pay the
market
price
Bid Price Vs Market Price
25% Bid

8. Amazon EC2 Spot – in the wild
1) We make this easy using the
Spot bid advisor
2) With deliberate pool
selection and bidding, you
will keep your Spot instance
as long as you need to.
3) And with new features like
Spot fleet diversified we do
the heavy lifting for you...

9. Spot Bid Advisor – aws-spot-labs

10. EC2 Best practices
Fault toleranceFault tolerance
for Spot
StatelessStateless Multi-AZMulti-AZ Loosely coupledLoosely coupled Instance
Flexibility
Instance
Flexibility

11. Example customer cases

12. Why use Spot – customer examples
39 years of drug research re-processed, using over 80,000 cores, in 9
hours for $4,232
- Approximately 87,000 compute cores at peak
- Estimated 39 years of computational chemistry performed in 9 hours
- Three candidate compounds successfully identified

13. “By using AWS Spot instances, we've been able to save 75% a month
simply by changing four lines of code. It makes perfect sense for saving
money when you're running continuous integration workloads or
pipeline processing.” - Matthew Leventi, Lead Engineer, Lyft
Why use Spot – customer examples

14. The $9 Billion Experiment
Why use Spot – customer examples

15. Why use Spot – customer examples
Scaling up as many as 1000 Spot instances a day to handle real time ad
delivery
Petabyte-Scale Data Pipelines with Docker, Luigi and Elastic Spot
Instances

16. EC2 Spot fleet!

17. Spot fleet helps you
Launch Thousands of Spot Instances
with one RequestSpotFleet call.
Get Best Price
Find the lowest priced horsepower that works for you.
or
Get Diversified Resources
Diversify your fleet. Grow your availability.
And
Apply Custom Weighting
Create your own capacity unit based on your application
needs

18. Diversification with EC2 Spot fleet
Multiple EC2 Spot instances
selected
Multiple Availability Zones
selected
Pick the instances with similar
performance characteristics e.g.
c3.large, m3.large, m4.large,
r3.large, c4.large.

19. EC2 Spot fleet

20. Lets see New Auto Scaling
Spot fleet in action..
Queue based processing
Stateless Applications (e.g. web tiers)
Docker powered by ECS

21. AWS cloud
Region
Amazon S3
DynamoDB
Amazon SQS
CloudWatch172.16.0.0/16
Internet
gateway
region-1a - 172.16.0.0/20 region-1b - 172.16.16.0/20
region-1c - 172.16.32.0/20 region-1d - 172.16.48.0/20
Cluster
Controller
c3.4x Spot r3.4x Spot c3.4x Spot r3.4x Spot
c3.4x Spot r3.4x Spot
Queue based processing

22. Stateless Web Application
Elastic Load
Balancing
Stateless
Web Servers
(Spot)
Stateless
Web Servers
(Spot)
Session
State Data
Spot fleet
Availability Zone A
Availability Zone B
Stateless
Web Servers
(Spot)
Stateless
Web Servers
(Spot)

23. Docker powered by ECS
Task
Task TaskTask

24. Results - Web Application
50 instances requested,
over 30 days.
- Never dropped
below 45 instances
- 85% discount if you
wanted 50 and
could withstand
dropping to 45
- If you only wanted
45 the discount is
still 83%

25. Results - Grid
Requested 1000
vCores over 30 days
Minimum 960 vCores
Mode 1024 vCores
Average 1012 vCores
Average Price of $0.012
per vCore
Savings of over 80%

26. Some additional considerations
Session state
Elastic Load Balancing
Two minute warning

27. Session state for the web application in DynamoDB.
• Data replicated across availability zones.
You can also choose other databases to maintain state in
your architecture.
• Amazon RDS using Multi-AZ deployments
• Amazon Elasticache
Where to store the state?

28. Since Spot fleet is configured to
span across multiple Availability
Zones, we highly recommend
enabling cross-zone load
balancing for the load balancer.
To allow in-flight requests to
complete when de-registering Spot
instances that are about to be
terminated, connection draining
can be enabled on the load
balancer with a timeout of 90
seconds.
Elastic Load Balancing

29. Capitalizing on two minute warning
When the Spot price exceeds
your bid price, the instance will
receive a two-minute warning
Check for the 2 minute spot
instance termination
notification every 5 seconds
leveraging a script invoked at
instance launch

30. Sample script – two minutes left!
1) Check for 2 minute
warning
2) If YES, detach instance
from ELB
3) OTHERWISE, do nothing
4) Sleep for 5 seconds
$ if curl -s http://169.254.169.254/latest/meta-
data/spot/termination-time |
grep -q .*T.*Z; then instance_id=$(curl -s
http://169.254.169.254/latest/meta-data/instance-id);
aws elb deregister-instances-from-load-balancer
--load-balancer-name my-load-balancer
--instances $instance_id;
/env/bin/flushsessiontoDBonterminationscript.sh; fi

31. Batch Processing with
Amazon EC2 Spot

32. Batch oriented applications can leverage on-demand
processing using EC2 Spot to save up to 90% cost:
Batch Processing with Amazon EC2 Spot
Monte Carlo
simulation
Molecular
modeling
Media
processing
High energy
simulations

33. DEMO!

34. Thank you!

35. Appendix

36. Reference Links
EC2 Spot Documentation:
http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/spot/
http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/spot/bid-advisor/
http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/spot/getting-started/
http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/spot/faqs/
http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/spot/testimonials/
User Guide
http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/using-spot-instances.html
http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/spot-fleet.html
Helpful AWS Blog Posts
https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/focusing-on-spot-instances-lets-talk-about-best-practices/
https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/building-price-aware-applications-using-ec2-spot-instances/
https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/compute/cost-effective-batch-processing-with-amazon-ec2-spot/
https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/compute/dynamic-scaling-with-ec2-spot-fleet/