Newvem Q&A: Making the Most of AWS Spot Instances

Newvem Q&A: Making the Most of AWS Spot Instances

By Doug Barney

Newvem recently released its Spot Instance filter, which makes this AWS capacity easier to manage and take better economic advantage of this innovative way of buying cloud capacity.

To Newvem, “this is a story about enterprise adoption of the public cloud, and how AWS spot instances offer a natural business case for enterprises user to take advantage of public cloud computing power in a cost effective manner.  Newvem helps accelerate this process by enabling cloud users to reduce costs, improve usage, and help ensure security.” At least that’s how Newvem’s vice president of marketing, Cameron Peron, put it.

MSP Today spent more time with Peron drilling into Spot Instances and how to best use them.

MSP Today: What is great about Spot Instance?  

Peron: Spot Instances offer an extension for enterprise level companies to utilize computing power that would otherwise be too costly to maintain on premise.  Amazon has been championing Spot Instances as a cost effective solution for running non time sensitive workloads with high profile customers like FourSquare, Pinterst and Yelp in order to fit specific business cases such as:

  • Running complex analytical workloads as batches
  • Performing simulations for scientific projects like drug discovery or genomics research
  • Processing massive amounts of big data projects

The real advantage that AWS offers in the public cloud domain is that cloud users can get access to high level infrastructure by bidding at a price point that makes sense.  The prices are market driven, allowing the user to buy only when the price is right and stops when the price rises again.  Compared to on-premise and other computing solutions Spot Instances are an excellent solution for performing non-time sensitive workloads.

MSP Today: What are the drawbacks?  

Peron: There are two major problems that AWS users can potentially encounter when using spot instances:

  • Hard to forecast and plan budgets without visibility to usage trends.  Cloud user needs to plan his budget in line with the expectations of his CFO (financial) and R&D team (product flow time estimates)
  • Could be losing on money with by using overkill instance types.  In many cases workloads are moved in short batches (while bid price is aligned), it's difficult to tell if the instance types being used fit the actual workload requirements. Small batches overtime can result in a ‘nickel-and-diming’ effect where over utilized machines can waste unnecessary costs in the long term.  

MSP Today: How does the Newvem Spot Filter work?

Peron: Newvem Analytics filters spot instance cost and usage from the resource level.  A component within Newvem's SaaS based dashboard, AWS users can visualize their spot instance costs, risks, and assets over various time series and solve business cases such as:

  • Gain simple visibility to spot costs.  Newvem’s cloud vitals give a clear picture into spot costs and assets for more control and confidence to operate and execute budgets confidently.  Rather than waiting for the monthly bill, AWS users can and fire off an email, with Newvem forecast data, to their CEO or CFO to make financial planning decisions.
  • Easily spot and isolate problems of spot workloads.  Spot usage heat map visualizes actual spot usage by hour, independently from on-demand instances, in order to indentify peak usage and mitigate risks.
  • Better forecast spend over spot.  Plan bidding strategy and reduce costs with reports detailing peaks and compare spend to actual resource utilization.
  • Sleep better at night.  With clear visibility into security, utilization and availability risk exposures, AWS users can improve more secure and business proprietary batch workloads with more confidence.

MSP Today: How did Newvem come up with the idea?  

Peron: Our customers requested this to specifically address business cases such as:

  • Gaining visibility to cost trends during a 24/7 day and monthly period (micro view within the 30 day period that the AWS bill doesn't provide)
  • Many customers blend their On-Demand and Spot and need to build an effective strategy to use both use efficiently (for example, to support a specific service level via On-Demand and run a cost effective cloud via Spot)

The spot instance filter is very useful to see the trends in costs and usage between the two to optimize their bidding strategy, identify and isolate risks, and improve their resource utilization.

MSP Today: Did you beta test it? What was the customer reaction?  

Peron: We beta test all of our new features!  Take it from one of our customers and a large spot instance user:

"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" - Gil Bahat, DevOps Engineer at Magisto

MSP Today: What types of customers is it aimed at? IT, MSPs, hosters?  

Peron: We are targeting this to all AWS users that take advantage of Spot.  In line with AWS's vision to address enterprise needs, this Spot Instances and Newvem's Spot Instance Filter fit classic use cases for enterprise IT 

MSP Today: What else should we know about Newvem?  

Peron: Newvem specializes in providing visibility to AWS cost and usage.  By analyzing the actual consumption of AWS sorceresses (EC2, Reserved Instances, Spot Instances and S3) enable cloud users to optimize their costs, reduce risks, and improve overall usage.  



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