AWS EC2 Spot instances can now be stopped and started like On-Demand instances

https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2020/01/amazon-ec2-spot-instances-stopped-started-similar-to-on-demand-instances/

by HedgedHuman • 7 years ago

97 16 7 years ago

aws.amazon.com

Havoc• 7 years ago

Rapidly moving toward compute as a commodity priced in the same way global commodity markets are. Interesting times

pram• 7 years ago

When can I start trading options on EC2 pricing though??

heavenlyblue• 7 years ago

When EC2 becomes an actual market, rather than a monopoly?

chad_strategic2• 7 years ago

If Amazon or wall st. can figure how to make a cut off the trading. At that point they will trade options. Sounds like something I would want to trade... kinda that whole Enron thing... (except hopefully the fraudulent part)

kapilvt• 7 years ago

Very cool, been running into issues with this previously trying to manage mixed instances kinds in an asg.

One tip, as an easy way to track api changes in aws, checkout https://awsapichanges.info/

chad_strategic2• 7 years ago

Aws spot instances have saved me so much money... it’s such a great service.

cliqueiq• 7 years ago

Obviously a response to yesterdays post:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22027459

sudhirj• 7 years ago

Huh? They’re completely unrelated.

a012• 7 years ago

No, they're two different things.

etaioinshrdlu• 7 years ago

Spot also supports hibernate on some instance types: https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2017/11/amazon-ec...

Hibernate is just like good old hibernate from windows XP days. You save the RAM to disk. And resume your processes on next boot and they won't even notice they were stopped! (Except for the time has changed...)

It might be really helpful for low priority batch processing.

Disclaimer: I've never tested this.

HedgedHuman• 7 years ago

Neat! Did not know that. Thanks :-) The 100GB RAM cap seems rather limiting though.

The ideal case scenario imho (one step beyond this stop/start-at-will feature) would be "convertible" spot - being able to migrate to on-demand with zero downtime when ec2 needs that capacity back - that'd solve a lot of my problems.

teraflop• 7 years ago

You can (effectively) do that already -- just set your spot bid to the maximum you're willing to pay, i.e. the on-demand price.

paulfurtado2• 7 years ago

When a spot instance gets interrupted, they've supported terminate, stop, and hibernate for a while. Hibernate is effectively just stop, but has an additional hook inside the instance to tell linux to save memory to disk while shutting down.

This post is different: with on-demand instances you can stop them whenever you like and only be charged for storage while they're in the stopped state and then start them up when you need them again (keeping all the same settings, like the IP, etc). A stop/start is also the way to effectively move your instance to new hardware if there is an instance with the underlying host. Annoyingly, the stop/start API calls were rejected for spot instances. This announcement means this is now finally possible.

MaxBarraclough• 7 years ago

This is a useful addition.

It's for persistent spot requests, so presumably it doesn't include defined-duration spot instances. Perhaps that will come later.

Perfectly possible to work around it even if not, of course.

AWS EC2 Spot instances can now be stopped and started like On-Demand instances

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