Ask HN: Why pay 10x the on-demand rate for spot instances on EC2?

1 pointjtokoph2 comments

Screenshot of spot price history here: https://twitter.com/tokoph/status/787735501247700992

Is this always a mistake or is there a legitimate reason to do this?

There was a notable incident where the price hit $1k/hr in 2011.

https://moz.com/devblog/amazon-ec2-spot-request-volatility-h...

From talking to AWS, when people pay above-on-demand prices, it's because they carelessly put in a huge bid.

This happens because Amazon charges whatever people bid. Internal Amazon teams, particularly in India, use spot instances and have the type of people who are so lazy they use the max of all bid prices for all instance types. That's in additional to all the other stuff they do like exposing internal tools to the internet because they can't be bothered to connect to the VPN or starting huge clusters on a different region of another team's AWS account so no one will find it. Amazon doesn't care because it's internal cost and a million dollars to Amazon is like a thousand to everyone else.

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