Get Ready to Save Big:

An Introduction to AutoSpotting

If you’re like most organizations, you are constantly looking for ways to save money on your AWS infrastructure. One great way to do this is by using Autospotting to automatically purchase spot instances when they are available and at a significantly lower price than the on-demand instances. In this blog post, we will introduce you to Autospotting and show you how it can help you save up to 80-90% on your AWS EC2 costs!

What is Autospotting?

Autospotting is an open-source solution that allows you to automatically convert regular on-demand Amazon EC2 instances into Spot instances and keep those running. Autospotting automatically detects termination of Spot instances and replaces those with new VMs. It ensures that you are never paying for more compute capacity than you need, and can save you thousands of dollars monthly on your AWS computing resources.

How does Autospotting work?

Autospotting automates not only the change of instance type in a group, but also bidding on the Amazon AWS EC2 Spot market and conversion back to on-demand instances in case Spot VMs are not available at any point.

Spot Instances are normally available at a massive discount of up to 80-90% compared to on-demand pricing, but can be interrupted within two minutes notice by AWS. Autospotting automatically detects these interruptions and relaunches your Spot Instance in a new Availability Zone or with higher bid, minimizing downtime and maximizing cost savings.

Normally the spot bidding process is static and can be done manually using the AWS console, but with AWS exposing pretty much everything via APIs, it can be automated as AutoSpotting does. AutoSpotting will take care of converting on-demand into spot instances for you and will do it automatically, in a rolling update manner by gradually converting instances from the tagged groups. It reduces the frequency of interruption by selecting them from the most available capacity pools and with maximum possible diversification.

There is still a risk of VMs being terminated with short notice when the Spot instance market price surges, however, if this happens – AutoSpotting can automatically fallback to on-demand instances.

What are the benefits of using Autospotting?

The runtime costs of Autospotting service itself are minimal because of its serverless architecture. It follows a pay-as-you-go model meaning you can simply uninstall it and the server groups will eventually revert to fully on-demand.

It is fully hosted within your AWS account, and with a minimalist set of IAM permissions and no SaaS backend or external dependencies, Autospotting proves to be very secure.

It is easy to use and can be installed in minutes using CloudFormation or Terraform. It requires close to zero infrastructure changes, and can be deployed on entire AWS Organizations using CloudFormation StackSets.

Furthermore, you can easily combine Spot Instances with On-Demand, Reserved Instances and Savings Plans Instances to further optimize workload costs with performance and reliability in mind.

 

Autospotting is 100% open source and available on GitHub.

Illustration of Autospotting Instance

Three simple steps to get started with Autospotting

  1. Install AutoSpotting from the AWS Marketplace by using CloudFormation or Terraform.
  2. Click Continue to Subscribe on the top right and follow the instructions.
  3. Tag your Autoscaling groups with the tag “spot-enabled” set to “true”, without any other configuration changes required.

Conclusion

AutoSpotting is pretty much the only open source spot market automation tool for AWS today.

Many companies around the world use it and it is estimated to be saving them millions of dollars monthly.

If you have a large footprint that you want to migrate to Spot quickly, Autospotting is for you. Using Autospotting assumes that you follow a well architected framework by AWS and stick to its practices. Depending on the use case you could run fully on Spot instances, or mix it with other types to safeguard from rapid change in demand or availability. In either case, test carefully before setting it up in your production environments.

Are you looking to lower your AWS bill? Our team will be happy to optimize your Cloud setup using a number of practices. Let’s get in touch!