
Ask HN: Is there an EC2 Spot Instance shortage? - mattlong
I'm new to dealing with spot instances, so maybe i'm just missing something, but why am I unable to get a single c1.xlarge spot instance in us-east-1b activated? I put in an absurdly high max price or $10/hr yesterday for 1 instance and it has still not been started.<p>How can the going rate be $0.23/hr and my $10 bid not get honored? Isn't the idea that if there's an extra capacity of X machines, it goes to the X highest bids? Shouldn't the rate be much higher than $0.23/hr if there are very few spot instances available?
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newobj
Speaking only as an EC2 user, I have not seen any evidence that there's any
kind of "king of the hill" bidding going on w/ spot instances. You get
machines if your "bid" exceeds the current spot price AND there is available
capacity. What controls the current spot price? I don't know.

I get the feeling that Amazon is experimenting with really trying to create a
market here, but that there are still some very strong controls and limits
with respect to how the pricing is computed. For example, most spot prices
tend to max out at the reserved instance rate. I highly doubt that's a market
effect. It's certainly worth bidding over the reserved, but under the normal,
instance rate. I'm guessing that it's going to be difficult to create a market
that is unrestricted but still preserves the quality of the user experience,
in terms of rapid oscillations around different support points of bid prices,
preventing anyone from keeping a server up for a coherent amount of time. You
could bid-bomb DOS the market too, for example, if you were willing to spend a
little money. You only need to hold the machines for an hour...

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inaka
maybe $10 is so high they rejected it? similar to adding a zero on a stock
purchase at etrade - they'll call you and tell you you overbid...

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mattlong
interesting indeed. I hadn't considered this. If this is the case, it's
unfortunate they don't reject bids saying they're too high.

I just submitted several more otherwise identical bids at different prices to
see what happens...

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mattlong
FYI, the price doesn't seem to matter. A bid for $.50 isn't being fulfilled
either. I still don't understand why a bid higher than the going rate isn't
being fulfilled. :-/

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nissimk
3 words: christmas shopping season

