Tuesday 28 November 2017

Guide on usage of Amazon EC2 Spot Instances

Amazon EC2 Spot Instances


In this article, you will be learning how to use an Amazon Elastic Cloud Compute spot instance that will meet your computing needs. At the start, you may find it a bit difficult on operating Amazon EC2 Spot but if you learn the knack of operating this you will save 50% to 90% on-demand instances. Amazon EC2 spot Instance can be terminated by Amazon at any time for capacity or price reasons.

Let’s understand the operation of Spot Instances:-

The first thing while using a Spot instance you should first decide whether you want the spot instance for a short period or long period. An long Lived Spot instance is for long period and if such instance gets discontinued you can have an option of using a replacement instances. But that may involve waiting for the price to be decreased by using a different availability zone or instance type or switching to the on-demand instance. Spot Instance is utilized for short period workloads which can be operated when the spot market is beneficial and discontinue once the use is over. Spot Instance can be also utilized for manual testing and development. Frontend Spot instance should be used with considerable care but for the backend, spot instances can handle interruption or launch failures but it is essential to have a strategy to tackle such errors.

AWS Spot Instance


Key Aspect of the Spot Instance Market:-

There are different states of spot request such as open, active, failed, canceled and closed which depends on the situation and condition of the spot instances. Spot Markets differs from the operating system, availability zone and instance type that consist of a spot price. Once the spot request is fulfilled nothing can be changed later you can only terminate the request. While requesting for a spot instance you need to do bidding according to the spot price or otherwise when the bidding price is less than the spot price then the bid is rejected and they won’t charge any money. If the bid price exceeds the spot price then to make way for that instances other spot instances will discontinue and it will start from the lowest bid price by prior two minutes notice. There is one thing that you should keep in mind that the bid prices shouldn’t be higher than 10 times the on-demand price. Some types of instances are not available in the spot market such as the t2.micro instance which is a small instance type that is used for basic testing which is not available at the spot instance and is available free in the AWS Free Tier.



Bidding Strategies:-

You have to make a bidding Strategy that can help you in not getting terminated by Amazon because of less bid price. While making a strategy you should keep in mind the money factor and also how long time you want to keep the bid at the maximum price. You can bid high so that the instances aren’t interrupted but if the price of the bid is staying high for a long time then save your work and terminate the instance and changeover to a different way of carrying out the workload. But Amazon Unfortunately doesn’t support such strategies so you will require using the API to write the code to carry out such strategies. You can also use a third-party service that manages to transition the workload gracefully.  You can keep a Low Bid Strategy, Mid-range Bid Strategy, On-demand bid Strategy and High Bid Strategy. So while requesting a spot instance make sure that you do enough planning so that when you opt for a perfect bid price for the time that you want the spot instance to be working.

AWS Features and Functions


Additional Features and Options:-

When you request for one-time spot instance and if that request gets canceled, interrupted or terminated by Amazon then you have to recreate an instance for a new spot request to be submitted. But a persistent spot request is a spot that if the instance gets terminated then automatically a new spot request will be submitted. For the Legacy customers who are using EC2 Classic will not require specifying an availability zone because the spot service will find the best availability zone with the lowest price but there may be times where it won’t always target lowest price availability zone. You can launch multiple spot instances together but the launch group will be built only if all of the instances can be created. If there is a shortage of capacity or price then none of the instances will be created but if when any one of the instances is terminated by the Amazon then it won’t affect other instances. Auto-scaling group of spot instances can be utilized to manage the variable additional capacity. You can use Spot Fleet for launching multiple instance types or to meet target capacity that you determined in the Spot Fleet request.

AWS Spot Instance Pricing


Spot Instance Pricing Trends and History:-

It is very difficult to predict spot markets but it is suggested to look for spot instance pricing history so that you get the idea of the uncertainty, comparison, and variability in prices.

AWS Monitoring


Launching, Monitoring, and Termination:-

To combine the creation of the spot instance with installing the applications that can easily carry out the workload by making scripts or connect to the frontend immediately upon launch. When the Spot Instances is frontend then associate it to the frontend load balancer which is in the launch script and do some load testing and health checks before connecting to the load balancer. You can monitor the endpoint on the spot instance and a 2-minute termination notice are detected by monitoring an endpoint but you can use this info to gracefully terminate the instance. Use Amazon Web Service AutoScalling groups, User data Scripts, CloudFormation and Launch Configuration instead of using custom scripts operating to launch or terminate your own instance.


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