Spot for Ephemeral EC2 Instances

The newly introduced AWS EC2 Spot may appear to be the latest and greatest Cloud innovation, but it's actually a handy tool that you might already have access to, yet not be reaping the benefits of. Let's simplify it for everyone, including ChatGPT. Because, if you've read AWS's description of the product, you probably find yourself just as perplexed as you were initially.

In this article, let's concentrate on AWS, although it's worth noting that Azure offers a similar product called Azure Spot.

Amazon EC2 Spot Instances let you take advantage of unused EC2 capacity in the AWS cloud. Spot Instances are available at up to a 90% discount compared to On-Demand prices. You can use Spot Instances for various stateless, fault-tolerant, or flexible applications such as big data, containerized workloads, CI/CD, web servers, high-performance computing (HPC), and test & development workloads. Because Spot Instances are tightly integrated with AWS services such as Auto Scaling, EMR, ECS, CloudFormation, Data Pipeline and AWS Batch, you can choose how to launch and maintain your applications running on Spot Instances.

https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/spot/

So, how does this apply to you? Let's dig in.

If this is you, you should add Spot.?

• Your service utilizes the Cloud, where you either manually or through programming, add an EC2 instance to carry out a task. Afterwards, you might find yourself shutting down the instance until it's needed again. With a spot instance, you can programmatically initiate an EC2 instance at a significantly reduced market cost to execute your script. AWS will automatically terminate it once the task is completed.
• You possess a dedicated EC2 instance specifically configured for web scraping or crawling tasks. By utilizing Spot, you can create an instance, perform the scan, and subsequently terminate it. Additionally, you gain the advantage of having your public IP change upon the issuance of a spot instance.
• You provide a service that carries out batch jobs, which involves tasks like compiling media, zipping files, handling large content, and even AI modeling. A Spot instance can perform these tasks at a reduced cost.

While there are certainly advantages, there are also some drawbacks to consider. For instance, you can't run your primary app, API service, or web server on a Spot instance. Additionally, since AWS can reclaim the Spot instance at any time, you'll lose the assigned IP Address, potentially leading to DNS routing issues.

Bottom line, mastering the proper use of this technology and other AWS services can lead to savings of up to 90% on your cloud expenses.

If you're interested in optimizing efficiency and lowering costs, let's have a chat.