When Containers met Spot Instances

We are very excited to announce a new partnership between Spotinst and Rancher Labs to deliver intelligent management and migration of container workloads running on spot instances. With this new solution, we have developed a simple, intuitive way of using spot instances to run any container workload reliably and for a fraction of the cost of traditional applications.

Since the dawn of data centers, we’ve seen continuous improvements in utilization and cost efficiency. But like Jevons’ Paradox, the more efficient we become in consuming a resource, the more of that resource we consume. So we always are seeking the newest, fastest and uber-optimized of everything.

How it works?

Rancher is an open source platform for building a cross-cloud container service. It is able to create instances on any host, running in any cloud, and provides consistent networking and storage functionality around the container. Spotinst is a SaaS platform that enables reliable, highly available use of AWS Spot Instances and Google Preemptible VMs with typical savings of 70-90%.

Spotinst and Rancher are taking container management to the next level with Docker “checkpoint and resume” (CRIU project). Based on metrics and business rules provided by Spotinst, Rancher can freeze any container and resume it on any other instance, helping to reduce DevOps workload and fatigue.

For example, if Spotinst identifies that the Spot instance a container is running on, is about to terminate (with a 4 – 7-minute heads-up), Spotinst will instruct Rancher to pause that container and relocate it to another relevant instance.

Unprecedented Availability for Online Gaming

While pizza servers, blade racks and eventually virtualization technology paved the way for modern data centers, today’s cloud computing customer expects increasingly higher performance and higher availability in everything from online gaming to genome sequencing.

An awesome example of how Docker delivers high availability can be seen in this presentation.

The presenters show how they containerized Quake, had it running on a DigitalOcean server in Singapore, and then live migrated it to Amsterdam with the player experiencing practically zero interruption to his game. Using “checkpoint and resume”, they didn’t just stop the container, but took an entire running process with all its memory, file descriptors, etc. and effortlessly moved it and resumed it halfway around the world. How it works?

Bottom line, this winning combo will allow you unprecedented availability at super-optimal pricing.

Summary: Rancher and Spotinst hook-up to deliver highly available, distributed application deployments, at guaranteed rock-bottom pricing. Their joint solution seamlessly integrates Rancher’s “checkpoint and resume” container orchestration, with Spotinst’s predictive analysis and management of AWS Spot instance markets and Google Preemptible VMs.

Create your first Cluster today – Integrate your Rancher account with your Spotinst account

For a demo, Please contact – info@spotinst.com \ info@rancher.com.

Best Regards, The Rancher and the Spotinst Teams.