Amazon Spot Instances are a pretty cool feature of EC2, and represent an innovative way to buy cloud capacity, especially for shops with bursty needs. And they are way cheaper than buying Reserved Instance or On-Demand prices.
“Spot Instances allow you to name your own price for Amazon EC2 computing capacity. You simply bid on spare Amazon EC2 instances and run them whenever your bid exceeds the current Spot Price, which varies in real-time based on supply and demand. The Spot Instance pricing model complements the On-Demand and Reserved Instance pricing models, providing potentially the most cost-effective option for obtaining compute capacity, depending on your application,” Amazon explains. “Spot Instances can significantly lower your computing costs for time-flexible, interruption-tolerant tasks. Spot prices are often significantly less than On-Demand prices for the same EC2 instance types. Additionally, for some distributed, fault-tolerant tasks (like Web-crawling or Monte Carlo applications), you may be able to simultaneously accelerate your computational task and reduce its overall cost by opportunistically incorporating Spot Instances.”
But Spot Instances are far from perfect, or so argues Newvem. “Amazon has been championing Spot Instances as a cost effective solution for running batch workloads with customers like FourSquare and large medical institutions, yet it’s nearly impossible to effectively forecast costs and usage, and difficult to consistently minimize risks over batches,” Newvem said. “The cost of Spot Instances is based on supply and demand, thus making it can be hard for users to track and understand their spot instance consumption and cost forecasting.”
Coming to the rescue is the new Newvem Spot Instance Filter, which can visualize and analyze the risks and the spot cost. With it, IT can make sure it’s making appropriate use of these inexpensive Spot Instances, and can get rid of those instances that are underutilized and therefore a waste of money.
“Spot Instances, along with RedShift and Dedicated Instances, are a cornerstone AWS offering for enterprise level users. Together with Newvem's Spot Instance filter, AWS users can expect to run cost effective workloads on the AWS cloud in line with their bidding strategy,” said Cameron Peron, vice president of marketing for Newvem.
One customer is seeing the advantages. “Ensuring that business critical workloads are secure over the public cloud is very important to us. Using Newvem’s Spot Instance filter, we get a very clear picture of our spot costs and assets and easily improve our bidding and scaling strategy to take advantage of re-sizing opportunities,” said Gil Bahat, DevOps engineer at Magisto. “Using Newvem’s Spot Instance filter, we can filter spot environments to better understand identify resources and cost allocation that needed some fine tuning.”
Newvem Partners Up
This past November, Newvem partnered up with no fewer than 30 members of the Amazon Partner Network.
“The core feature across Newvem's "Cloud Partner Program" is the strategic use of Newvem's cloud usage analytics service and extensive community of cloud users to increase each business' overall adoption and cloud efficiency,” the company said. “Participating partners in the program include industry leading service providers that implement and manage clouds for customers as well as solution providers that provide complimentary expertise and capabilities to help cloud users improve their cloud's efficiency and effectiveness.”
Edited by
Alisen Downey
