Great article. Cutting ec2 costs is important, especially for companies with heavy data engineering / data science workflows. Spark service providers make it

Great article. Cutting ec2 costs is important, especially for companies with heavy data engineering / data science workflows. Spark service providers make it easy to spin up huge clusters (100+ nodes) to perform ad hoc analyses. The costs can quickly spiral out of control, even if you're getting 3x cost savings on the spot market. Some tangential thoughts: * Is there an AWS API that returns the cheapest availability zone in a region for a given instance type? Or is the GUI that's screenshot in the blog the only way to see? * I have seen the 90%+ cost savings for certain instance types * Sometimes you lose a spot instance, look at the pricing history graph to confirm the price spike, and don't see any spike that was above your bid price... it can be frustrating