When you're big enough that creating an internal secondary market for instances makes economic sense
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Saves up to 90% of AWS EC2 costs by automating the use of spot instances on existing AutoScaling groups. Installs in minutes using CloudFormation or Terraform. Convenient to deploy at scale using StackSets. Uses tagging to avoid launch configuration changes. Automated spot termination handling. Reliable fallback to on-demand instances.
“Cloud providers possessing large quantities of spare capacity must either incentivize clients to purchase it or suffer losses. Amazon is the first cloud provider to address this challenge, by allowing clients to bid on spare capacity and by granting resources to bidders while their bids exceed a periodically changing spot price.”
“Amazon's spot price is unlikely to be set according to market supply and demand. Rather, price oscillates within a very narrow band most of the time, which is more likely to be an artifact of some pricing algorithm with predetermined reserve price.”
“The key idea of our algorithms is to use pricing signal to regulate user demand. One may argue that such an algorithm gives poor service to the user as it pushes tasks out of the queue in order to maximize cloud broker's profit.”