EBS-Optimizer on AutoSpotting

Weekly Update - 13 Jan 2023

Fri, 13 Jan 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Hello, and welcome to my latest weekly status update.

This week was another good week for me, I’m very happy about my progress.

LinkedIn Outreach

I’ve recently started experimenting with cold outreach to drive some more sales, and I’ve been iterating on my messages.

Over the last weekend I asked for some feedback in one of the online communities I’m in, where I started a thread in which I asked how to make my messages less spammy and intrusive.

Weekly Update - 6 Jan 2023

Fri, 06 Jan 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Hi, Happy New Year, and welcome to the first weekly update from 2023 and the first one on Beehiiv!

For more context, this is a continuation of my older AutoSpotting, Cloudutil newsletters, and going forward will mirror my current LinkedIn newsletter which I’ve been using for weekly updates for the last few months after I left Amazon AWS. You can check out my previous posts on LinkedIn.

Monthly Update September 2021

Mon, 04 Oct 2021 03:36:28 +0100

Hello,

As usual, here’s my latest monthly report.

AutoSpotting

Since the previous month there hasn’t been much going on in the mainline repo, at least not from my side. The only thing I did there was updating dependencies, including instance type information for the recently released M6i instance types.

From the community side, I’m very thankful to mello7tre who contributed a couple of significant changes:

allow us to reuse existing Spot instances instead of always launching new ones, saving some time when doing Spot replacements in certain situations.
added a global configuration flag (defaults to off) that allows us to disable the Instance Rebalancing Recommendation events, which sometimes get emitted without resulting in a Spot termination, creating additional instance churn. The caveat is that with this enabled you only get the 2-minute termination notification, and don’t get to run the instance termination lifecycle hooks, but it gives you a bit less instance churn if you don’t need those.

This month I also updated the Terraform code to match CloudFormation and documented it as officially supported installation method on the AWS Marketplace.

Monthly Update August 2021

Sun, 29 Aug 2021 10:13:42 +0100

Hello,

As usual, here’s my monthly progress report, this time covering August 2021.

AutoSpotting

As I mentioned in my previous report, I’ve been working on releasing the new AutoSpotting stable build on the AWS Marketplace. After many months of hard work, I’m happy to announce that the release finally landed on the Marketplace a few days ago, and it’s probably the first serverless paid product built with Lambda available on the Marketplace.

Monthly Update July 2021

Mon, 09 Aug 2021 07:24:54 +0100

Hello,

Another month, another community update. This one comes about a week late as I’ve been on a long vacation and some things had to give.

Progress report - July 2021

AutoSpotting - throughout my vacation I’ve been working a lot on a still unreleased branch that prepares AutoSpotting for being published on the AWS marketplace as a paid Docker product, charging a small percentage of the savings. This was way harder than I expected, as AutoSpotting is probably the only Lambda-based software being made available as paid Docker product so a lots of things had to be figured out and tweaked for making it work under the Marketplace constraints. There are many not-so-functional changes under the hood, such as calculating the generated savings, repackaging the Lambda to use Docker images in order to fit the Docker product requirements of the marketplace, charging a percentage of the savings amount through the Marketplace APIs from a new Fargate task(don’t ask! ;-) ), etc. I’ve learned a lot while building this(I’ll probably publish a technical blog post about it at some point) and it was a lot of fun and even though it basically works, I still have a number of things to figure out or update(especially docs). My goal is to have this published by the end of August, fingers crossed! I’ll do my best to not cause much impact to the OSS users, but some things might be rough on the OSS side for a while after this code lands.

Monthly Update June 2021

Sun, 04 Jul 2021 11:54:03 +0100

Hello,

Another month, another AutoSpotting community update.

Progress report - June 2021

EBS-Optimizer - To be honest this month I haven’t made as much progress on AutoSpotting as I had hoped, but I started a couple of new workstreams which kept me busy. The first is EBS-Optimizer, my new tool dedicated for EBS volume upgrades from GP2 to GP3, resulting in up to 20% better cost and often better performance than GP2 volumes.