I missed my opportunity to reply to your comment, but I really appreciate it, and I wanted to find a way to get this back to you. The comment in question:
"Well, I was one of the engineers that made the change :) I'm not sure how much I can tell, but the public reason was: "to make pricing more predictable".
Basically, one of the problems was customers who just set the spot price to 10x of the nominal price and leave the bids unattended. This was usually fine, when the price was 0.2x of the nominal price. But sometimes EC2 instance capacity crunches happened, and these high bids actually started competing with each other. As a result, customers could easily get 100 _times_ higher bill than they expected."
There was more to it than that, but I figure that's a good enough reference point.
Thank you for these improvements. It doesn't change anything, in terms of how much savings I can get by following the latest generations and exotic instance-types, but it does help with the reliability of my workloads.
It's been a huge benefit to me, personally, that I can provide some code that enables the potentiality of servers dying, with the benefit of 80% cost savings without using RIs.
You can also try another product of my former team: https://aws.amazon.com/savingsplans/ - it's similar to RI, but cheaper because it doesn't provide an ironclad guarantee that the instance will be available at all times. It's still a bit more expensive than spot, but not by much.
I missed my opportunity to reply to your comment, but I really appreciate it, and I wanted to find a way to get this back to you. The comment in question:
"Well, I was one of the engineers that made the change :) I'm not sure how much I can tell, but the public reason was: "to make pricing more predictable". Basically, one of the problems was customers who just set the spot price to 10x of the nominal price and leave the bids unattended. This was usually fine, when the price was 0.2x of the nominal price. But sometimes EC2 instance capacity crunches happened, and these high bids actually started competing with each other. As a result, customers could easily get 100 _times_ higher bill than they expected."
There was more to it than that, but I figure that's a good enough reference point.
Thank you for these improvements. It doesn't change anything, in terms of how much savings I can get by following the latest generations and exotic instance-types, but it does help with the reliability of my workloads.
It's been a huge benefit to me, personally, that I can provide some code that enables the potentiality of servers dying, with the benefit of 80% cost savings without using RIs.