
AWS EC2 Spot instances can now be stopped and started like On-Demand instances - HedgedHuman
https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2020/01/amazon-ec2-spot-instances-stopped-started-similar-to-on-demand-instances/
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etaioinshrdlu
Spot also supports hibernate on some instance types:
[https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2017/11/amazon-
ec...](https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2017/11/amazon-ec2-spot-
lets-you-pause-and-resume-your-workloads/)

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.

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HedgedHuman
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.

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teraflop
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.

~~~
paulfurtado
This isn't actually effective. When there are instance shortages and someone
launches an on-demand instance, no matter how high you set your spot bid price
your spot instance will still be terminated in favor of the on-demand
instance. We run hundreds of spot instances with their max price set higher
than on-demand and still see terminations on popular instance types: there are
few day-to-day, but periodically nearly all of them are terminated at once.
During those situations, if you went to replace the terminated spot instance
with an on-demand instance, you'll even get an error stating that they're out
of on-demand capacity for the instance type in that zone, so it's pretty clear
that it happens when they've completely run out of capacity for some instance
type in a zone

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tedk-42
Spot on!

Some AZs don't have much capacity for certain types of instances.

Fun fact: An availability zone A for person 1 is not guaranteed to be the same
as availability zone A of person 2. AWS mixes them up per account.

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kapilvt
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/](https://awsapichanges.info/)

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

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

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

~~~
chad_strategic
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)

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MaxBarraclough
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.

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cliqueiq
Obviously a response to yesterdays post:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22027459](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22027459)

~~~
sudhirj
Huh? They’re completely unrelated.

