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I once considered writing an EC2 autoscaler that knew the exact timestamps of the instances so that it could avoid shutting down VMs that still had 59 minutes o

I once considered writing an EC2 autoscaler that knew the exact timestamps of the instances so that it could avoid shutting down VMs that still had 59 minutes of "free" time left because they'd been up across another hour-long threshold. That sort of nonsense logic shouldn't be useful, but Amazon was giving a huge economic incentive for it. This is certainly a long time coming.

vacri 9y ago
Remember that AWS has been in the game for over a decade. Per-hour billing was amazing when it came in. Also, is the economic incentive really that huge? Or is it just a nicety?
- jdc0589 9y ago
  it's totally dependant on your workload. for some users there will be absolutely no difference, for others it could easily be thousands or tens of thousands of dollars of savings over a year.
  - vacri 9y ago
    Thanks, I stand corrected. I've read through a few other use cases in the comments here and I can see now that there's scope for savings, depending on workload.
- userpass 9y ago
  When you want to run a task for 3 minutes with 40 cores then paying a minimum of 10 minutes or 60 minutes can make the entire idea unprofitable.
daigoba66 9y ago
If it helps, AWS' default auto scaling algorithm specifically takes into account instances which are nearest to their next billing hour and prioritizes those for termination accordingly to, in theory, save money.
macarthy12 9y ago
> that it could avoid shutting down VMs that still had 59 minutes AWS batch currently does this. I presume that will change now.
matwood 9y ago
> I once considered writing an EC2 autoscaler that knew the exact timestamps of the instances so that it could avoid shutting down VMs that still had 59 minutes of "free" time left because they'd been up across another hour-long threshold. Years ago my boss at the time did this (this was when scaling had to mostly be done in code/by hand). I just recently updated all the code as I moved it to using spots. The low price of spots made it less important to shut ones down closer to the hour mark though.

vacri 9y ago

Remember that AWS has been in the game for over a decade. Per-hour billing was amazing when it came in. Also, is the economic incentive really that huge? Or is it just a nicety?

jdc0589 9y ago
it's totally dependant on your workload. for some users there will be absolutely no difference, for others it could easily be thousands or tens of thousands of dollars of savings over a year.
- vacri 9y ago
  Thanks, I stand corrected. I've read through a few other use cases in the comments here and I can see now that there's scope for savings, depending on workload.
userpass 9y ago
When you want to run a task for 3 minutes with 40 cores then paying a minimum of 10 minutes or 60 minutes can make the entire idea unprofitable.

daigoba66 9y ago

If it helps, AWS' default auto scaling algorithm specifically takes into account instances which are nearest to their next billing hour and prioritizes those for termination accordingly to, in theory, save money.

macarthy12 9y ago

> that it could avoid shutting down VMs that still had 59 minutes AWS batch currently does this. I presume that will change now.

matwood 9y ago

> I once considered writing an EC2 autoscaler that knew the exact timestamps of the instances so that it could avoid shutting down VMs that still had 59 minutes of "free" time left because they'd been up across another hour-long threshold. Years ago my boss at the time did this (this was when scaling had to mostly be done in code/by hand). I just recently updated all the code as I moved it to using spots. The low price of spots made it less important to shut ones down closer to the hour mark though.