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by darkr
3741 days ago
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AWS launched spot blocks last year that does just this. It's not as cheap as regular spot instances, but you do get a guarantee that your instance will be around for a configurable period between 1 and six hours (you pay more as you approach the six hour mark), after which time it will be automatically terminated. I guess this is useful for longer-running batch jobs (longer than the 2 minute warning you get of termination on regular spots) of a relatively known duration. https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-ec2-spot-blocks-for-def... |
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For example, a fixed duration m3.medium is currently $.037/hr for 1 hour and $.047/hr at 6 hours. GCE's equivalent n1-standard-1 is $.05/hr all the time (and automatically triggers sustained use discounts). If you ask for a 4-hour block and only use 3.2 hours you pay the same 16 cents as you would have on GCE. As I tell my friends, if you want a cheap, guaranteed VM just use GCE on-demand; if you're locked into AWS though, check out Spot!
Disclaimer: I work on Compute Engine (and Preemptible VMs specifically), so I'm clearly biased.