Ask HN: Why are p2.16xlarge EC2 spot instances 10x the price of on-demand?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14769026

by marklit • 9 years ago

4 5 9 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

EC2 is currently listing Linux-based p2.16xlarge instances in Ireland at $155.52 / hour at the moment. Getting on-demand instances at $15.552 / hour is proving impossible. Any idea why there's a price spike? Any good alternatives short of just buying some cards?

petercooper• 9 years ago

I'm guessing if you can't even get any at on-demand pricing, the demand is high, the supply is too low, so the only way to get access is to pay through the roof.

marklit• 9 years ago

I'm wondering if the Cloud providers are seeing cryptocoin mining as the primary workload at the moment and don't want to be left with a ton of inventory the next time there is a difficulty increment and clients move on.

alexcnwy• 9 years ago

You have to request access to on demand P* instances so I suspect some people can't get as much allocation as they need and end up turning to the spot market.

Makes sense in constrained supply regime.

vosper• 9 years ago

I haven't used AWS for a year, but last time I saw this it was crypto coin miners who didn't know how to use the spot market place properly. This was way back when Bitcoin was first spiking, and for about two weeks the price of the compute instances was ridiculous (CPU mining was still a thing). This was confirmed later by an AWS person.

If you look outside the default us-east-1 region you often find prices are more stable (though not always as cheap)

dakami• 9 years ago

Funny you should ask. I just looked into this:

https://twitter.com/dakami/status/884715382061252608

Yeah. Ethereum blew up and all that compute is going towards GPU Mining.

Ask HN: Why are p2.16xlarge EC2 spot instances 10x the price of on-demand?

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