Spot-Instances on AutoSpotting

New AutoSpotting Releases

Thu, 11 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000

After almost 8 months since the previous AutoSpotting release, we’re happy to announce not one, but two AutoSpotting releases at the same time, packed with lots of improvements.

I was hoping to release this much earlier, but somehow each time we got quite close, customers reported yet another little but important edge case that would be be great to fix and then another and so on…

This finally resulted in a few dozens of relatively small reliability, correctness and performance improvements addressing lots of edge cases throughout the code base.

New AutoSpotting Release: Mixed Autoscaling Groups Support

Tue, 04 Jul 2023 00:00:00 +0000

How ECS capacity providers inspired me to fix an ancient AutoSpotting issue

July 04, 2023

I’m excited to announce that a new version of AutoSpotting is now available.

For some context if you’re not familiar with AutoSpotting, it’s a tool that makes it easy to adopt Spot instances in existing Autoscaling groups, without requiring configuration changes, by replacing their instances with Spot clones using attach/detach API calls.

For more information about AutoSpotting you can have a look at AutoSpotting.io or check out our Open Source code on GitHub.

My Thoughts on the Current State of EC2 Spot Pricing

Wed, 10 May 2023 00:00:00 +0000

My thoughts on the current state of EC2 Spot pricing

And what you can do about it

May 10, 2023

I’ve recently seen a post on HackerNews discussing an interesting article titled “Farewell to the Era of Cheap EC2 Spot Instances”, painting a pretty depressing picture of recent trends of EC2 Spot pricing.

As someone building AWS cost optimization tooling that makes it easy for people to use Spot instances, I’m pretty familiar with this space so thought I’d share my 2 cents about this current situation and wanted to also offer a few suggestions to Spot users who want to still get the most of Spot instances.

Another New AutoSpotting Release in Less Than a Week

Sat, 15 Apr 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Fixing ECS load balancer draining

April 15, 2023

Over the last 7 years I’ve been working hard to make AutoSpotting the best solution for running Spot Instances in Autoscaling groups.

Just a few days ago I released our biggest release ever which makes AutoSpotting managed groups of Spot instances even more resilient to low capacity situations than the vast majority of Autoscaling groups configured with a single OnDemand instance type.

As I always keep improving the experience based on user feedback, I just released a new version of AutoSpotting that improves reliability for ECS users, making AutoSpotting with ECS a more highly available solution than plain ECS itself!

LeanerCloud Product Updates

Wed, 12 Apr 2023 00:00:00 +0000

After less than 7 weeks from our previous AutoSpotting release, we’re happy to announce a new one, our biggest release so far in the entire 7 years history of AutoSpotting.

It brings over a dozen improvements in performance, reliability, correctness and ease of use, including the following major enhancements:

Proactive Spot instance launch on Spot terminations*, reducing the instance replacement time by avoiding the use of temporary On-Demand instances.*
Diversified failover to On-Demand instances during periods of high-demand of EC2 capacity provides even more resilience to Insufficient Capacity Errors(ICE) than the typical AutoScaling groups configured with a single instance type.
Automatically determine the Spot product for each AutoScaling group*, resulting in a simpler setup, correct instance type selection, accurate billing and higher diversification for Windows, RHEL and Suse Linux Spot instances.*
Supporting installation of AutoSpotting in any AWS region as its main region, reducing the complexity and networking costs of the previous cross-region setup.
Fixed a number of issues related to Security group configuration*, which sometimes caused Spot instances to fail to launch or start with incorrect Security Groups.*

This updated version of AutoSpotting is available on the AWS Marketplace and can be installed as usual using CloudFormation or Terraform.