What is a Spot instance?
Amazon sells EC2 virtual instances in three ways. On-Demand instances offer the greatest flexibility as they can be turned up and down at any moment and customers are billed for only what they use. While extremely convenient, On-Demand is the most expensive option. Reserved instances offer customers an easy way of reducing cost by about 40%, although they require a customer to to make a long term commitment for 1-3 years and customers are charged regardless of whether they use the instance or not. Lastly, Amazon offers Spot instances as a third alternative. Spot instances are Amazon's excess capacity that is not currently in use. Customers can place bids to use this extra capacity at tremendous discounts up to 80-90% off the On-Demand rate. The only caveat is that these instances can be reclaimed by Amazon at any moment leaving your application vulnerable to downtime.
What is Spot optimization?
Xosphere Instance Orchestrator automatically performs Spot optimization by leveraging AWS Spot instances to optimize the cost of your infrastructure while maintaining the same level of reliability as On-Demand instances.
How does Instance Orchestrator work?
Instance Orchestrator integrates natively with Amazon Auto Scaling Groups and monitors the instances within each group. When Spot instance capacity is available at a favorable price, Instance Orchestrator will replace On-Demand instances with Spot instances. When the Spot instance capacity is no longer available at a favorable price, Instance Orchestrator will replace the Spot instances with On-Demand instances ensuring your application remains available. Instance Orchestrator runs in the background and automatically switches back and forth between Spot and On-Demand instances making your application always available while taking advantage of Spot prices as frequently as possible. The end result is savings up to 80% on EC2 without any risk to your up-time or availability.
Advantages
Reliable & Low Risk
Does not replace AWS native Auto Scaling Groups
No Launch Configuration changes
Quick & Easy
Installs in less than 10 minutes with CloudFormation or Terrafom
No code changes and no development process changes
Safe & Secure
No third party access to your AWS account required
All data stays in your control in your account
Features
Reserved instance prioritization
Instances utilizing reservations will not be replaced by Spot instances.
Automatic diversification of spot instances
Spot instances are diversified amongst family, size, and availability zone to minimize any impact when Spot instances are reclaimed.
Connection draining
Integrates with Elastic Load Balancer (ELB) and Application Load Balancer (ALB) to gracefully drain any established connections prior to Spot termination.
Works with containers
Native integration with Kubernetes, ECS, and EKS allows for containers to automatically be migrated to new nodes prior to Spot termination.
Tag based configuration
Easily enable and configure settings using AWS tags.
Custom bidding
Works out-of-the-box with best practices on Spot bidding or you can specify your own bidding strategy
Spot termination handler
Automatically respond to Spot termination notifications and fast track replacement On-Demand instances.
Stateful workloads
EBS volumes can be configured to be attached to new replacement instances enabling stateful applications to work seamlessly.
Notification and Lifecycle hooks
Works with existing Auto Scaling Group notification settings and lifecycle hooks.