I've set myself the challenge to migrate all of my projects to run on EC2 Spot Instances which can be terminated with 2 minutes notice.

Over the next few weeks I have set myself the challenge of migrating all of my personal projects from a typical Linode VPS setup, into AWS and running on AWS EC2 Spot Instances.

What's a Spot Instance?

A Spot Instance is spare EC2 compute resource that is made available for to you for a discount of up to 90% off the on-demand price.

Sounds good right? Well, Spot Instance can be interrupted by EC2 with a two minute warning when EC2 needs the spare capacity back.

My interest in spot instances started when I found out that Yelp runs most of their platform on AWS Spot Instances. The cost saving is attractive, as well as the engineering challenging of setting up my projects to survive in an ephemeral environment.

EC2 Costs

If you've not used EC2 before, you'll find that pricing varies depending on what you're using. The instance type and pricing structure matter.

The type of instance determines how many CPUs, how much RAM, network performance, etc. The pricing structure also varies depending on what you need:

  • On-demand
    On-demand pricing is a fixed hourly rate which you would expect from any typical compute or VPS provider.

    Provided EC2 has the capcity, you will get the instance at the hourly rate and the instance will run as long as you need it to, without being interrupted.

  • Reserved Instances (RI)
    RI is designed to reserve compute resource for a given period of time. As you're reserving compute resource upfront (and paying upfront) AWS offer a discount of up to 75% off the on-demand price.

    RI can be useful for long-lived services such as database clusters. As with on-demand, provided the capacity exists you can start an RI instance and use it for the reserved duration without it being interrupted.

  • Spot Instances
    Save up to 90% off on-demand prices by using spare capacity, but be prepared that the spare capcity can be recalled with two minutes notice. The exact pricing of a spot instance changes over time based on supply and demand

For AWS a Spot Instance is the most cost-effective way of using EC2, but it does have the limitation that it could be taken away at any moment with little notice!

The Challenge

Migrating my projects to run not only in AWS but also on Spot Instances will require some re-engineering of how my projects work. I anticipate that this will only be possible if I adopted more automation than I currently use for my personal projects.

This will be an opportunity to experiment with the concept of immutable servers. I also plan to leaverage the other services that AWS provides such as CloudFront and RDS.

I'll use my blog to record the progress and lessons learned as I transition my projects over to use Spot Instances over the next few weeks.