Amazon Introduces Bidding For EC2 Compute Time

ryanvm alerts us to Amazon's beta announcement this morning for what it is calling Spot Instances, which represent a name-your-own-price way of using the elastic compute service. Here is Amazon's documentation on the feature. "For customers with flexibility in when their applications can run, Spot Instances can significantly lower their Amazon EC2 costs. Additionally, Spot Instances can provide access to large amounts of additional capacity for applications with urgent needs." Customers can use the EC2 API to see recent spot prices.

Comments

Permutation city

[Brian Gordon]

Reminds me of:

and civilisation has accumulated vast amounts of ubiquitous computing power and memory which is distributed internationally and is traded in a public market called the QIPS Exchange (QIPS from MIPS, where the Q is Quadrillions)

Great book. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permutation_city.

Indictment of cloud computing?

[teknopurge]

I wonder if amazon overestimated the uptake of EC2 and needs to have a fire-sale to get _some_ income on the investment. They need to have capacity to service new orders but by default this means that they have un-used resources that are costing them more then the unit bring in.

Re:Indictment of cloud computing?

[NeilO]

No, I don't think so. More likely they already own outrageous capacity to handle the December retail crunch but don't use anything close to that capacity in any other month of the year. So I doubt there's any additional investment in capacity for EC2. EC2 utilizes what Amazon already owns.

If you read Werner's blog entry on this new feature you'll see they reserve the right to interrupt a Spot Instance and essentially restart it later on. You need to make sure whatever you're doing with that instance you can checkpoint and resume. I think that means Amazon is not trying to "fire sale" underutilized resource. More like they're filling in the cracks between larger "full price" instances in order to maximize utilization.

Re:It's too proprietary

[Alpha830RulZ]

but their ability to exert lock-in in the medium term is pretty weak

Which is related to their strength, for me. I use them precisely because of the short term availability. We ran a test job just today on their service to test the scalability of a routine. Bought 20 2 core machines for 4 hours for I think $64 or so. I'd have to have at least 4 big multi-core servers lying around idle to have that available for a test bed, best case about $12,000 for the bunch (I've priced them in the last month, this is the best choice I found. That's 4 separate servers in a single 2U chassis. I have several boxes from these guys, they are very solid, are 2/3 the price of Dell, and don't need a blade cabinet.)

I wouldn't use EC2 for long term use, but for short term, or speculative use, it's a pretty good deal. I've found them to be pretty stable and easy to use.