Working with Spot Market on AWS

Introduction

Warnings

  • The spot market is a key element of being cost effective on the AWS public cloud. There is a tradeoff, however: You will need to learn enough about how the spot market works to accomplish two things: First secure the resources you need for your computing task at the reduced cost and second not securing more resources than you intend (for example in an automated cluster spin-up) which can deplete your budget.
  • The AWS VM pool is huge. It is a mistake to equate that pool to the spot market pool. The latter is considerably smaller; so there are commensurate ‘constrained resource’ patterns to be aware of.

The AWS Spot Market

The main takeaway points are heavily adapted from here

Tags: AWS account_management cloud_basics scale cost