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Shlomo Swidler
Cloud Computing Consultant, Developer, EC2 Expert
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There's no reason to assume that the spot price is always set below some bid. It could be a pure function of the supply of spot instances. Just because the price was set to a certain level doesn't mean anyone bought at that price.
In effect, when there are no spot instances left the spot price can be said to be infinite - so no bids would ever win.
Thoughts on Amazon EC2 Spot Instances
The innovation just keeps on coming from the good folks at Amazon Web Services. This week they announced a new pricing model for Amazon EC2 instances: spot pricing. Spot pricing is the third pricing model Amazon is offering for EC2 instances -- with On-Demand and Reserved being the other two -- ...
"There will always be a premium placed on guaranteed capacity."
And when there are no more on-demand instances... the spot price will be higher than the on-demand price.
If you really want to ensure you have access to the on-demand prices longer-term, you should buy reserved instances now. In less than six months (at current rates) the 1-year term breaks even.
Thoughts on Amazon EC2 Spot Instances
The innovation just keeps on coming from the good folks at Amazon Web Services. This week they announced a new pricing model for Amazon EC2 instances: spot pricing. Spot pricing is the third pricing model Amazon is offering for EC2 instances -- with On-Demand and Reserved being the other two -- ...
Looking at the historical graphs of spot instance prices you can see that the spot price occasionally spikes to above the on-demand price.
http://cloudexchange.org/charts/us-east-1.linux.m1.large.html
Presumably this occurs when a large batch of on-demand instances is provisioned. For example, the spike to 0.400 in the us-east region on 17 Dec is nicely correlated with this user's provisioning of 300 m1.large instances:
http://twitter.com/Lounibos/status/6777451245
The fact that the price drops back down to its prior level after a few hours is likely an indication that Amazon's pricing algorithm is still being perfected.
But the bottom line is: the spot price can exceed the on-demand price.
Thoughts on Amazon EC2 Spot Instances
The innovation just keeps on coming from the good folks at Amazon Web Services. This week they announced a new pricing model for Amazon EC2 instances: spot pricing. Spot pricing is the third pricing model Amazon is offering for EC2 instances -- with On-Demand and Reserved being the other two -- ...
One more Whoa Moment data point:
As reported in this thread,
http://developer.amazonwebservices.com/connect/thread.jspa?threadID=39924&tstart=0
the spot price for one instance type did already exceed the on-demand price. It was for a short time, but it happened.
Thoughts on Amazon EC2 Spot Instances
The innovation just keeps on coming from the good folks at Amazon Web Services. This week they announced a new pricing model for Amazon EC2 instances: spot pricing. Spot pricing is the third pricing model Amazon is offering for EC2 instances -- with On-Demand and Reserved being the other two -- ...
Hi Geva,
The idea of a spot instance contest came from David Kavanagh (and includes the caveat of "for the least $"). Here's my tweet, which is a retweet of David's: http://twitter.com/ShlomoSwidler/status/6722022106
Regarding the availability of EC2 instances, don't assume they're always available. Here are a bunch of threads in the EC2 support forum where people complain of the InsufficientCapacity error. This error means there's no more on-demand instances available at the moment. These threads are from all over the calendar, so it's not a recent development.
http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Adeveloper.amazonwebservices.com+InsufficientCapacity
Currently there are 270 results for this query.
Whoa moment.
IMO, Spot Instances should be a wake-up call for developers: Be careful wedding your code to EC2, lest you find yourself paying above the on-demand price when there are no more on-demand instances.
Thoughts on Amazon EC2 Spot Instances
The innovation just keeps on coming from the good folks at Amazon Web Services. This week they announced a new pricing model for Amazon EC2 instances: spot pricing. Spot pricing is the third pricing model Amazon is offering for EC2 instances -- with On-Demand and Reserved being the other two -- ...
Very nice to see the application handling its own operational events.
A minor nitpick: Example 3 probably should say
if (averageRequests > maxRequestsPerInstance)
otherwise you're scaling up when you don't need to.
The Interactive Cloud (Part II - Adding Operational Awareness to your Application)
In part I of of this topic, I covered the general concept and motivation behind the "Interactive Cloud". I described how the interactive cloud enables applications to be managed in a similar way to the way we run our business. In this post, I discuss further details of what it means to add opera...
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