[MrPowers]

Great article. Cutting ec2 costs is important, especially for companies with heavy data engineering / data science workflows. Spark service providers make it easy to spin up huge clusters (100+ nodes) to perform ad hoc analyses. The costs can quickly spiral out of control, even if you're getting 3x cost savings on the spot market.

Some tangential thoughts:

* Is there an AWS API that returns the cheapest availability zone in a region for a given instance type? Or is the GUI that's screenshot in the blog the only way to see?

* I have seen the 90%+ cost savings for certain instance types

* Sometimes you lose a spot instance, look at the pricing history graph to confirm the price spike, and don't see any spike that was above your bid price... it can be frustrating

[luhn]

I'm not aware of any API (surprising for AWS), but you use Spot Fleet to get an array of spot instances optimized for cost.

Having a bid above spot price does not guarantee you'll keep the spot instance. AWS can terminate a spot instance at any time if they need the capacity—That's the deal. It used to be more closely tied your bid price, but they've been moving away from that.