8 ms·
AWS launched spot blocks last year that does just this. It's not as cheap as regular spot instances, but you do get a guarantee that your instance will be aroun
by darkr 11y ago
AWS launched spot blocks last year that does just this. It's not as cheap as regular spot instances, but you do get a guarantee that your instance will be around for a configurable period between 1 and six hours (you pay more as you approach the six hour mark), after which time it will be automatically terminated.
I guess this is useful for longer-running batch jobs (longer than the 2 minute warning you get of termination on regular spots) of a relatively known duration.
https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-ec2-spot-blocks-for-defined-duration-workloads/ https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-ec2-spot-blocks-for-def...
- boulos 11y agoCombined with per-minute billing and our lower on-demand pricing, regular GCE instances often end up being cheaper. For example, a fixed duration m3.medium is currently $.037/hr for 1 hour and $.047/hr at 6 hours. GCE's equivalent n1-standard-1 is $.05/hr all the time (and automatically triggers sustained use discounts). If you ask for a 4-hour block and only use 3.2 hours you pay the same 16 cents as you would have on GCE. As I tell my friends, if you want a cheap, guaranteed VM just use GCE on-demand; if you're locked into AWS though, check out Spot! Disclaimer: I work on Compute Engine (and Preemptible VMs specifically), so I'm clearly biased.