Marketplace on AutoSpotting

Weekly Update - 24 Feb 2023

Fri, 24 Feb 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Hello, and welcome to this week’s update.

Without further ado, let’s dive right in.

Little recap from last week

In my last week’s update I mentioned how I’ve been working most of the week helping a new customer onboard.

They were reluctant to run the latest AutoSpotting version because of their blue-green deployment strategy, but they wanted to try an older version that still works in the legacy cron mode. They were initially very happy about the way I supported them to use an older version, and even said it was the best support they ever got from a vendor.

Monthly Update August 2022 - Liftoff

Sat, 10 Sep 2022 20:36:12 +0100

Hello,

I’m happy to announce that I finally left my full-time job last week, so this is my first status update as self-employed. Over the last few weeks I’ve been vacationing a lot So far there’s not much to share

It’s been a while since my previous update in here, which was at the end of October.

I’m now trying to resume these monthly updates, so in this first post after this gap I’d like to give a few updates covering the last months, and also my plans going forward.

Monthly Update October 2021

Sun, 31 Oct 2021 20:36:12 +0100

Hello,

As usual, here’s my latest monthly report.

Going forward I’ll release these reports here on the CloudUtil blog and I’ll only share the link through my mailing list and our new Slack #announcements channel.

If you want to be notified when I write a new one, don’t forget to sign up to the CloudUtil newsletter shown at the bottom of the page, or join us on Slack.

I also published as blog posts most emails I had sent to the AutoSpotting newsletter over the last year, so you can see how it changed over this time. I had to edit them a bit to fix URLs and clean them up a bit, bear with me in case there were any issues.

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.