Tag: Spot INstances

In recent years, public sector organizations have found success running their scientific data processing workloads on Amazon Web Services. As the number of workloads increase with the massive data volume and complex scientific simulations, organizations are looking for ways to optimize cost while maintaining research momentum. Amazon EC2 Spot Instances presents a compelling option to run unused Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) capacity with an up to 90 percent discount compared to On-Demand prices. However, the intermittent nature of Spot Instances often requires careful consideration, especially when handling time-sensitive mission-critical workloads. In this post, we discuss how organizations can effectively identify opportunities to use Spot Instances and Amazon Q Business to develop an enhanced Spot Instance analysis. 

In the spring of 2019, environmental modelers at the Lake Michigan Air Directors Consortium (LADCO) had a new problem to solve. Emerging research on air pollution along the shores of the Great Lakes in the United States showed that to properly simulate the pollution episodes in the region we needed to apply our models at a finer spatial granularity than the computational capacity of our in-house HPC cluster could handle. The LADCO modelers turned to AWS ParallelCluster to access the HPC resources needed to do this modeling faster and scale for our member states.

Amazon EC2 Spot Instances are now available in Amazon Web Services (AWS) GovCloud (US) Regions. AWS GovCloud (US) is Amazon’s isolated cloud infrastructure and services designed to address specific regulatory and compliance requirements of US Government agencies, as well as contractors, educational institutions, and other US customers that run sensitive workloads in the cloud. With Amazon EC2 Spot Instances, AWS GovCloud (US) customers can take advantage of the largest pool of cost-effective compute capacity in the world, while realizing savings up to 90% compared to on-demand prices. Spot Instances provide acceleration, scale, and cost savings that are ideal for fault-tolerant, flexible, loosely coupled, and stateless workloads.

The shift from buying hardware to accessing cloud services makes technology faster, easier and less expensive. It also allows you to buy using operating expenses (OpEx) instead of capital expenses (CapEx). But what if you have money that needs to be spent at the end of your budget year? Take a look at your options […]