Elastigroup now supports multiple AMI architectures in a single group

Today, we are excited to announce that, Spot by NetApp’s Elastigroup can support the use of multiple AMIs in a single Elastigroup. The release of this feature allows customers to utilize both AWS Graviton and x86 instances in the same groups and allows the Elastigroup autoscaler to launch instances based on the best spot pricing and availability in real time.

We’ve all heard about the great benefits that AWS Graviton instances can provide customers – improved performance and cheaper on-demand costs to name a few. And by now, you probably already know that spot instance availability and pricing are based on the supply and demand for those instances.

That’s right- the spot price for every instance type can vary across every availability zone worldwide based on the current supply and demand for these instances. For that reason when the latest and greatest instance types are released from AWS they may have the highest demand and least capacity available for spot instances, thus making them more expensive on the spot price. Let’s take a look at a live example in the US-West-2 region comparing the latest Graviton instances to that of a x86 instance with the same amount of vCPU & memory :

Graviton – C6G.4Xlarge

C5.4xlarge

From the example above we can conclude that although the Graviton instance has a cheaper on-demand price than the non-Graviton c5.4xlarge, the spot price is cheaper for the c5.4xlarge in all but one availability zone. For AWS customers that have been considering using Graviton instances, you will know they require the use of a different AMI and underlying AMI architecture (arm64) compared to x86_64. For that reason customers have been forced to choose either Graviton or x86 for their workloads unless they want to implement a custom solution.

When running workloads on Spot instances, availability, reliability and performance are top of mind. Spot instances can be stopped or terminated with little warning, so using them means managing these challenges. We encourage all of our Elastigroup customers to configure as many instance types and availability zones as possible within their groups. This will ensure Elastigroup will be ready to adapt and scale the most cost effective and available infrastructure depending on your configured strategy. And in the event spot instance availability is not favorable for all the configured spot markets, Elastigroup can fallback to on-demand instances by launching the cheapest on-demand instance configured within the group. The new capability to utilize multiple AMI architectures within a single Elastigroup will allow customers to greatly expand the number of instances they can configure within a single Elastigroup and should lead to more highly available, cost effective infrastructure!

Getting Started

Multiple AMIs in Elastigroup is available now and can be configured via the Spot API. The implementation of this new feature will be available in the Spot UI soon. Additional information on how this can be configured is available in the Spot Elastigroup API documentation and we will include an example from our API documentation below:

{
  "group": {
    "compute": {
      "launchSpecification": {
        "imageId": null,
        "images": [
          {"id" : "ami-12345678901234567"},
          {"id" : "ami-23456789012345678"}
        ]
      }
    }
  }
}

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