Realtime charts of EC2 spot prices | Hacker News Reader

Realtime charts of EC2 spot prices

cloudexchange.org

63 pointstimf19 comments

The sad thing about this is that I'm dreaming up ways to use it when I had no real use for it previously.

There is no rational reason for this.

I did exactly the same thing. Why, with just a few dozen hours of hard work, I could probably slice 10% off my $150 a month server bill! And it would make pretty graphs and take cool algorithms and be so much cooler than A/B testing button colors even if that would be about 20 times more effective per unit of effort.

My job as a business owner is to ruthlessly soulcrush the engineer in me some days.

Yes there is: if you have work to be done with a low priority and no deadline, it's perfect.

For example, I bet the EC2 bill would be cheaper than my electric bill if I wanted to run SETI@home on a bunch of instances when it dropped below a certain mark.

The tech didn't exist 2 weeks ago, but now that it does there is a whole class of problems that can be solved more easily.

Cool, I was curious also: http://www.spothistory.com/

Looks like I need to add datacenter, and you need to add OS :-)

I'll echo akamaka -- I like your graphs far more than timf's flash-based ones.

You might like to consider adding some indication (dotted lines, perhaps) of what the hourly rate for reserved instances is, since this should be approximately a floor on the hourly spot rate.

EDIT: Also, please adjust the vertical scaling based on the set of instances shown -- if I'm only looking at the price history for m1.small, it's silly to have it squished into the bottom 5% of the graph.

> more than timf's flash-based ones.

Clarification: I only submitted this link, found the announcement via twitter:

http://twitter.com/tlossen/status/6708121340

Suggestion -- use small multiples showing the data center prices on one screen, probably by making the graphs 1/4 size. Place your explanation in the space left empty since there's only (currently) 3 centers.

"A small multiple design consists of a single design repeated several times within the eyespan, each example showing a different value of the independent variable(s)."

hey casey, nice visualization. makes the relative prices of different instance types very clear.

I like your style of graphs.

ok, i've added windows ... now it's your turn again ;)

With us-east-1.linux.m1.small prices averaging around $0.03/hour, it might make sense to just set up an instance to continuously run on spot prices instead of paying the regular $0.085/hour. It won't ever be more than $0.085/hour (otherwise users would simply switch to the standard price) and it will probably be a lot less.

Unless, of course, the spot price instances are somehow different due to their transient nature, but I don't see anything to that effect on the site. Is there some reason why this would not work?

As people do this, the spot price will rise until you can't reliably use the strategy.

That's what I would figure, but it also makes no sense why it would exceed the on-demand price for the same instance, except perhaps in moments of sudden demand. Maybe Amazon will intentionally make it difficult to move an instance from on-demand to spot and back to discourage this?

Spot pricing does look good when you don't need extra EC2 instances on a regular basis and when you can write restartable applications.

That said, spot prices are fairly much the same as reserved instance pricing, except with reserve instances you have an extra up front fee. I (and some of my customers) simply use reserve instances.

I also started thinking of ways to use this, but reminded myself to not get to distracted from current work.

Spot pricing should almost always be below reserve instance price since the utility is reduced by being unpredictably available.

Great charts. Feature requests:

1. Put checkboxes for every type and then combine the chart for selected types. It will be great to compare m1.small for all regions, or most cheap types in us-east-1

2. Put a chart with calculated savings: us-east-1 m1.small cost $10 but currently is trading for $5, so the chart will show you are saving %50, etc.

Ohhh, this is just screaming for a futures market.

What is this?

See http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=993769

Reply on news.ycombinator.com