Handling AWS' New Spot Instance Termination Notices | Hacker News Reader

Handling AWS' New Spot Instance Termination Notices

luminal.com

22 pointsAndrewWright8 comments

I'm surprised you have to poll. I would have expected tAmazon to wo minute notices to a SNS topic.

As an infrastructure engineer, that seems like it would be overly complicated. You now need processes doing long polls or subscribing to SNS topics.

If you're polling the local metadata service, the longest you're waiting for an answer is 5 seconds, and you can immediately begin closing up your work properly to be most efficient about the compute time used.

Long polls would be great for something like this. From the client's perspective, it's not really any more complicated than normal polling.

SSEs even better.

That's what I get for commenting from my phone; I meant to say "I would have expected Amazon to publish two minute notices to a SNS topic."

When I want to use cron to run a task more frequently than once per minute, my trick is to have the target program perform the task more than once per invocation. E.g.:

  # script start, T=0s
  do_something()
  for n in range(0, 11):
    time.sleep(5)
    do_something()
  # script end, T=55s

Great to see Luminal popping up on Hacker News!

If you haven't heard of them before, this is their promotional video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yuSqtwYOUvo

They are doing some very cool stuff in regards to automation of cloud based infrastructure.

AWS post: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-ec2-spot-instance-termi...

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