

Realtime charts of EC2 spot prices - timf
http://cloudexchange.org

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waterlesscloud
The sad thing about this is that I'm dreaming up ways to use it when I had no
real use for it previously.

There is no rational reason for this.

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patio11
I did exactly the same thing. Why, with just a few dozen hours of hard work, I
could probably slice 10% off my $150 a month server bill! And it would make
_pretty graphs_ and take _cool algorithms_ and be so much _cooler_ than A/B
testing button colors even if that would be about 20 times more effective per
unit of effort.

My job as a business owner is to ruthlessly soulcrush the engineer in me some
days.

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casey
Cool, I was curious also: <http://www.spothistory.com/>

Looks like I need to add datacenter, and you need to add OS :-)

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cperciva
I'll echo akamaka -- I like your graphs far more than timf's flash-based ones.

You might like to consider adding some indication (dotted lines, perhaps) of
what the hourly rate for reserved instances is, since this should be
approximately a floor on the hourly spot rate.

EDIT: Also, please adjust the vertical scaling based on the set of instances
shown -- if I'm only looking at the price history for m1.small, it's silly to
have it squished into the bottom 5% of the graph.

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timf
> _more than timf's flash-based ones._

Clarification: I only submitted this link, found the announcement via twitter:

<http://twitter.com/tlossen/status/6708121340>

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kylec
With us-east-1.linux.m1.small prices averaging around $0.03/hour, it might
make sense to just set up an instance to continuously run on spot prices
instead of paying the regular $0.085/hour. It won't ever be more than
$0.085/hour (otherwise users would simply switch to the standard price) and it
will probably be a lot less.

Unless, of course, the spot price instances are somehow different due to their
transient nature, but I don't see anything to that effect on the site. Is
there some reason why this would not work?

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collision
As people do this, the spot price will rise until you can't reliably use the
strategy.

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kylec
That's what I would figure, but it also makes no sense why it would exceed the
on-demand price for the same instance, except perhaps in moments of sudden
demand. Maybe Amazon will intentionally make it difficult to move an instance
from on-demand to spot and back to discourage this?

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mark_l_watson
Spot pricing does look good when you don't need extra EC2 instances on a
regular basis and when you can write restartable applications.

That said, spot prices are fairly much the same as reserved instance pricing,
except with reserve instances you have an extra up front fee. I (and some of
my customers) simply use reserve instances.

I also started thinking of ways to use this, but reminded myself to not get to
distracted from current work.

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jdunck
Spot pricing should almost always be below reserve instance price since the
utility is reduced by being unpredictably available.

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EastSmith
Great charts. Feature requests:

1\. Put checkboxes for every type and then combine the chart for selected
types. It will be great to compare m1.small for all regions, or most cheap
types in us-east-1

2\. Put a chart with calculated savings: us-east-1 m1.small cost $10 but
currently is trading for $5, so the chart will show you are saving %50, etc.

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lallysingh
Ohhh, this is just screaming for a futures market.

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tlrobinson
What is this?

~~~
wmf
See <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=993769>

