Cluster orientation: The cost-availability sweet spot

When organizations deploy clusters — in, for example, Dev or Production environments — they may have different objectives around cost and availability. Dev clusters usually can tolerate more interruptions, as they are not running live services, but the expectation is saving money at the expense of availability. Production clusters, however, require the nodes with the highest availability, as they support live services, yet interruptions can reflect on the availability and translate to financial loss. 

Until recently, Spot Ocean launched nodes in the same manner for all clusters: a balanced option that takes both availability and cost into account, with no option to choose which is of higher importance. With the new cluster orientation in Spot Ocean, users can define their preferences per cluster, including the level of cost savings and the importance of availability for each cluster. This enables a more aggressive cost savings approach for the user and ensures the availability of their workloads. 

The new Spot Ocean cluster orientation options 

Balanced (default orientation for Ocean) 

Optimized towards both continuity and cost-effective infrastructure. This is the recommended option, as it provides the optimal balance between cost savings and availability. 

Cost-effective 

This option balances three parameters and provides a higher weight to cost savings.  

1. Instance types available for scale: Ocean will give higher weight to scale to cheaper markets. 
2. Spreading of the nodes: By default, Ocean spreads nodes between Availability Zones (AZs) and instance types to make sure that all nodes are not shut down at once in the event of interruptions. For this parameter, the cost factor has a higher impact over other parameters, such as the number of nodes in each AZ or for each type. 
3. Probability of interruption: For this parameter, Ocean will take a less restrictive approach and allow markets with a slightly higher chance of interruption to scale. 

Cheapest 

Spot Ocean will simply scale nodes in the cheapest market available. Note that this option is very restrictive. If the cheapest market is not available, Ocean will revert to on-demand pricing. 

Set up for Spot Ocean cluster orientation 

This feature is available for both Kubernetes (K8s) and Elastic Container Service (ECS) clusters.  

Relevant documentation: 

• Spot Ocean Cluster Orientation documentation 
• K8s API 
• ECS API 
• Using Terraform for k8s
• Using Terraform for ECS 

Get started with Ocean 

The ability to manage the way Ocean scales your nodes is now available to all Ocean users. You can choose the most important factor — cost, availability, or a balance of the two — while launching nodes and further increase the cost savings Ocean generates for you. 

Learn more about Ocean, our serverless infrastructure engine for containers, and request a demo today.