Meetup Report - June 2019 - AWS EC2 Spot Instances - Save 90% on your EC2 costs

This event was organized by Amazon User Group Kochi in association with EC2 Spot Team at Amazon Web Services and IBS Software Services.

This time our topic was AWS EC2 Spot Instances - Save 90% on your EC2 costs and the session was taken by Chakravarthy Nagarajan, Solution Architect - EC2 Spot Specialist at Amazon Internet Services Private Limited (AWS)

Amazon EC2 Spot instances offer spare compute capacity availavle in the AWS cloud at steep discounts compared to On-Demand instances. Spot instances enable you to optimize your costs on the AWS cloud and scale your application's throughput up to 10X for the same budget.

Meetup Session started with a self-introduction by all attendees. Then, Sridhar Bharadwaj, Business Development Manager - EC2 Spot at Amazon Web Services (AWS) introduced our speaker of the day Chakravarthy Nagarajan.

Chakra walked us through

EC2 Spot - Basics
EC2 Spot – Pricing model
EC2 Spot ready Workloads and AWS Managed Services
EC2 Spot Diversification Best Practices
Handling Spot Instance Interruptions
EC2 Spot Orchestration options - Spotfleet & Auto Scaling Groups (ASG) with EC2 Fleet
Demo - Spotfleet and ASG
Deploying specific Workloads on EC2 Spot instances (eg. Containers, Data Anaytics, ML, Web Services, etc)

Notes

Spot Instances

Amazon EC2 Spot Instances let you take advantage of unused EC2 capacity in the AWS cloud. Spot Instances are available at up to a 90% discount compared to On-Demand prices. You can use Spot Instances for various stateless, fault-tolerant, or flexible applications such as big data, containerized workloads, CI/CD, web servers, high-performance computing (HPC), and other test & development workloads.

Spot Instances - Pricing

With Spot instances, You pay the Spot price that's in effect for the time period your instances are running. Spot instance prices are set by Amazon EC2 and adjust gradually based on long-term trends in supply and demand for Spot instance capacity.

Spot instances are available at a discount of up to 90% off compared to On-Demand pricing. To compare the current Spot prices against standard On-Demand rates, visit the Spot Instance Advisor.

Best Practices

Spot Rules

Learn two simple rules to follow to maximize compute cost savings

Spot Capacity Pools have separate prices and change infrequently
Amazon EC2 will give you a 2 minute warning when we need the capacity back

Instance Flexibility

Test your application on different instance types when possible. Because prices fluctuate independently for each instance type in an Availability Zone, you can often get more compute capacity for the same price when you have instance type flexibility

Fleet API

EC2 Fleet simplifies the provisioning of EC2 capacity across different instance types, AZs, and across On-Demand, RIs and Spot purchase models. The same functionality is available in Spot Fleet.

Handling interruptions

Spot Instances receive a two-minute notice when these instances are about to be reclaimed by EC2, because EC2 needs the capacity back. Use Cloudwatch Events to get notfification when the Spot instances are interrupted by Amazon EC2. Also review the Spot Instance Advisor for average frequency of interruption for different Spot Pools.

Tools / Resources

Spot Instance Advisor : https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/spot/instance-advisor/
EC2 Spot Workshop : https://ec2spotworkshops.com

Additional referrences

CI/CD Workloads on Spot Instances : Watch Video
Containerized Workloads with Spot Instances : Watch Video
Big Data Workloads on Spot Instances : Watch Video
Rendering Workloads on Spot Instances : Watch Video
Web Applications and Services on Spot Instances : Watch Video
Amazon Online Tech Talks : Watch Video

The event concluded by a Thank You note by Abhilash Nair.

Once again on behalf of AWS User Group Kochi. We would like to thank,

Sridhar Bharadwaj and Chakravarthy Nagarajan for coming down to Kochi and sharing knowledge to our community members.
IBS Software Services for providing venue and refreshments.
All the attendees for joining with us on this weekend.

Thank you.

AWS Community Day Annoucements

Ahmedabad - 26th June 2019
Bangalore - 26th & 27th July 2019

Discount coupons for AWS User Group Kochi Members - Valid till June 30
Use FLAT10 for 10% discount for conference tickets
Use WORKSHOP for Rs 1000 discount on Workshops tickets
Use COMBO for Rs 1500 discount on Combo tickets
Chennai - 10th August 2019

Discount coupons for AWS User Group Kochi Members - Valid till June 30
Use ACDCHN10 for 10% discount for Community Day tickets

Join the community

Join the AWSUGKOCHI community - you can find us on our About page

Help us to grow this community, please share this page to your colleagues and friends - Thank you.