EC2 Spot Instances give you access to spare compute capacity in the AWS Cloud. Our customers use fleets of Spot Instances to power their CI/CD environments & traffic generators, host web servers & microservices, render movies, and to run many types of analytics jobs, all at prices that offer significant savings in comparison to On-Demand Instances.

New Streamlined Access

Today we are introducing a new, streamlined access model for Spot Instances. You simply indicate your desire to use Spot capacity when you launch an instance via the RunInstances function, the run-instances command, or the AWS Management Console to submit a request that will be fulfilled as long as the capacity is available. With no extra effort on your part you’ll save up to 90% off of the On-Demand price for the instance type, allowing you to boost your overall application throughput by up to 10x for the same budget. The instances that you launch in this way will continue to run until you terminate them or if EC2 needs to reclaim them for On-Demand usage. At that point the instance will be given the usual 2-minute warning and then reclaimed, making this a great fit for applications that are fault-tolerant.

Unlike the old model which required an understanding of Spot markets, bidding, and calls to a standalone asynchronous API, the new model is synchronous and as easy to use as On-Demand. Your code or your script receives an Instance ID immediately and need not check back to see if the request has been processed and accepted.

We’ve made this as clean and as simple as possible, with the expectation that it will be easy to modify many current scripts and applications to request and make use of Spot capacity. If you want to exercise additional control over your Spot instance budget, you have the option to specify a maximum price when you make a request for capacity. If you use Spot capacity to power your Amazon EMR, Amazon ECS, or AWS Batch clusters, or if you launch Spot instances by way of a AWS CloudFormation template or Auto Scaling Group, you will benefit from this new model without having to make any changes.

Applications that are built around RequestSpotInstances or RequestSpotFleet will continue to work just fine with no changes. However, you now have the option to make requests that do not include the SpotPrice parameter.

Smooth Price Changes

As part of today’s launch we are also changing the way that Spot prices change, moving to a model where prices adjust more gradually, based on longer-term trends in supply and demand. As I mentioned earlier, you will continue to save an average of 70-90% off the On-Demand price, and you will continue to pay the Spot price that’s in effect for the time period your instances are running. Applications built around our Spot Fleet feature will continue to automatically diversify placement of their Spot Instances across the most cost-effective pools based on the configuration you specified when you created the fleet.

Spot in Action

To launch a Spot Instance from the command line; simply specify the Spot market:

$ aws ec2 run-instances --instance-market-options '{"MarketType":"Spot"}' \ --image-id ami-1a2b3c4d --count 1 --instance-type c3.large

Instance Hibernation

If you run workloads that keep a lot of state in memory, you will love this new feature!

You can arrange for instances to save their in-memory state when they are reclaimed, allowing the instances and the applications on them to pick up where they left off when capacity is once again available, just like closing and then opening your laptop. This feature works on C3, C4, and certain sizes of R3, R4, and M4 instances running Amazon Linux, Ubuntu, or Windows Server, and is supported by the EC2 Hibernation Agent.

The in-memory state is written to the root EBS volume of the instance using space that is set-aside when the instance launches. The private IP address and any Elastic IP Addresses are also preserved across a stop/start cycle.

To learn more, read about Spot Hibernation.

— Jeff;