AWS News Blog
Four New Amazon EC2 Spot Instance Videos
If you have read about the Amazon EC2 Spot Instances but are not quite sure how to get started, how to make cost-effective bids, or how to build applications that can manage interruptions, I’ve got a treat for you. We’ve put together a trio of short videos that should give you all of the information you’ll need to get started. Here is what we have:
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Getting Started with EC2 Spot Instances – This video shows you how to launch, view, and cancel spot instance requests using the AWS Management Console. You will see how to log in to the console, select an AMI, and create a bid.
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Spot Instance Bidding Strategies – This video shows how customers choose bid strategies that have resulted in savings of 50-66% from the On-Demand pricing. Four strategies are covered: bidding near the hourly rate for Reserved Instances, bidding based on previous trends, bidding at the On-Demand price, and bidding higher than the On-Demand price. Watch this video to learn when it is appropriate to use each of these strategies. The video also references a particle physics project run by the University of Melbourne and the University of Barcelona on Spot Instances. More information about this project is available in a recent case study.
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Spot Instance Interruption Management – This video outlines multiple ways to create applications that can run in an environment where they may be interrupted and subsequently restarted. Strategies include using Elastic MapReduce or Hadoop, checkpointing, using a grid architecture, or driving all processing from a message queue.
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Using EC2 Spot Instances With EMR – This video shows how to run Elastic MapReduce jobs on a combination of On-Demand and Spot Instances to get work done more quickly and at a lower cost. The includes guidelines for choosing the right type of instance for the Master, Core, and Task instance groups.
I hope that you find these videos to be interesting and informative, and that you are now ready to make use of EC2 Spot Instances in your own application.
— Jeff;