New Pricing System Announced for Amazon EC2 Spot

What do all the new Spot changes mean for Spotinst users?

At Spotinst, we have been working together with the Amazon EC2 Spot Team to ensure that our customers will continue running Spot Instances with confidence, after this change.

Current Spotinst customers will seamlessly transition to the new pricing system without lifting a finger. Elastigroup is already compatible with the new announcements and all future AWS announcements so that you never need to reconfigure a thing as AWS continues to update their offerings.

Now that the changes are out there, we wanted to explain how these changes affect us, our customers, and any new customers that are thinking of using Spotinst.

What is different for Spotinst customers?

Beautifully, wonderfully, nothing.

Spotinst’s Elastigroup, as our customers see it, do not change. Under the hood, we have updated our mechanization and prediction algorithms to evolve with AWS’ recent changes. Our customers benefit from a stable, robust service built to drive application availability as well as cost savings.

We couldn’t be more thrilled to partner with AWS in helping make Spot Instances more reliable and available to use.

• It’s become even clearer that Amazon is embracing and pushing Spot Instances and pushing them hard.
  Now, Spot Instances are extremely easy to get started with. Without any bidding system or pricing models to learn, the barrier to running workloads on Spot is lower than ever.
• Running workloads that demand high or consistent availability now require a platform like Spotinst more than ever.
  Previously, Spot price spikes would indicate interruption and now EC2 Spot prices adjust in long-term and customers would have to observe the price trends to predict interruptions closely. By running millions of Spot Instances every week, Elastigroup has the data to reliably make these predictions across all regions, availability zones, and instance types.
  

Why is that?

• Less of visibility into Spot capacity changes – No longer one can predict and prevent interruptions based on trends or price changes.
• Interruptions will still come – AWS will interrupt Spot Instances when they run out of spare capacity.
• SLA – There’s lack of guaranteed availability or consistency that makes it difficult to run Spot for most use cases.

These changes bring a new spirit to EC2 Spot, immediately opening the door for innovation as to which workloads a DevOps team can run on EC2 Spot with confidence. This is the dawn of a new era of Spot, one where the relevant workloads for Spot Instances is limited only by your imagination.

Amiram.