
Ask HN: Why are p2.16xlarge EC2 spot instances 10x the price of on-demand? - marklit
EC2 is currently listing Linux-based p2.16xlarge instances in Ireland at $155.52 &#x2F; hour at the moment. Getting on-demand instances at $15.552 &#x2F; hour is proving impossible. Any idea why there&#x27;s a price spike? Any good alternatives short of just buying some cards?
======
vosper
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
Funny you should ask. I just looked into this:

[https://twitter.com/dakami/status/884715382061252608](https://twitter.com/dakami/status/884715382061252608)

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

------
petercooper
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
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.

