What are spot instances?
Introduced in late 2009, Spot instances are a new way for Amazon Web Services (AWS) customers to purchase its Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instance (a virtual machine) at lower costs for running their applications on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) infrastructure.
What are the benefits of spot instances?
The biggest benefit of spot instances is that they are often available at a discount compared to On-Demand instances. Thus, the spot instances can significantly reduce the cost of running your applications, grow your application’s compute capacity and throughput for the same budget, and enable new types of cloud computing applications.
How Spot Instances work?
Amazon Web Services (AWS) sells its spared EC2 instances in a spot market, which is similar to derivative markets. The spare EC2 instances are bundled in spot pools, based on instance type, platform, and availability zone.
In order to buy AWS spot instances, you need to place a bid. If there are spare EC2 instances (spot instances) available and your bid is above their current market price then you will get to use them as long as they are available and your bid price remains above their market price.
Why is Spot Management important?
Since the spot instances come cheaper than on-demand instances, they reap great savings but there are some risks involved. For example, if there are no spare EC2 instances (spot instances) available, you have to wait a long time until they availability in the spot market. Also, if the market price of the spot instances rises above your bid price, they will be terminated abruptly after a two-minute warning. And when this happens, all the processes running on the spot instances are dead, leaving you in a very bad situation, especially if you are running critical and customer-facing services. If you want to avoid such bad situations, you must have a proper spot management strategy in place to ensure that you always have sufficient spot instances to run your applications smoothly and your spot instances never get terminated like this.
The spot instance management not only saves you from going instance-less but also plays an important role in your AWS Cost Optimization by allowing you to use the spot instances at the lowest price possible.
How to ensure AWS Cost optimization?
For AWS Cost Optimization, you need a proper spot management strategy. To execute the spot management strategy properly, you must have basic and working knowledge of using AWS Spot Instances. Only, then you can manage your spot instances efficiently.
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