AutoSpotting - Community Edition

Most new features, bug fixes and improvements for increased reliability and better performance developed by the main author after July 2022 are only available in the commercial version of AutoSpotting, available on the AWS Marketplace. The only exception are security fixes, which will be patched in the Community Edition on a best effort basis.

If you notice any issues in the Community Edition feel free to report them but they are not being worked on by LeanerCloud anymore. Chances are they are already solved in the Commercial Edition, so you may want to try that out.

Bug fixes and new features contributed by the community are welcome and will remain available in the Community Edition indefinitely.

The list of ehnancements in the Commercial edition is documented in detail here, but you can see below a brief feature comparison of AutoSpotting options vs. AWS AutoScaling groups.

| Feature | Autoscaling Groups | AutoSpotting Community Edition | AutoSpotting Commercial | |------------------------------------------------------------|-------------------------------------|------------------------------------------------|------------------------------------| | Easy configuration rollout using tags | ❌ | ✅ | ✅ | | Automated Spot instance type diversification | If using attribute based selection | ✅ | ✅ | | Allocation policy with bias for new instance types | ❌ | ✅ | ✅ | | Spot event handling - Rebalancing Recommendation | Optional | ✅ (Default - increased instance churn!) | Optional | | Spot event handling - Termination Notification | ❌ | Optional | ✅ (Default - less instance churn) | | Spot event handling - Replacement with a new Spot instance | Requires Rebalancing Recommendation | ✅ Via Spot termination + ASG OnDemand launch | ✅ Proactive | | Load balancer and Target Group TCP connection draining | ✅ | ✅ (Relying on Autoscaling) | ✅ Proactive | | Automated ECS task draining | Requires UserData script changes | Requires UserData script changes | ✅ | | Failover to on-demand instances | ❌ | ✅ Relies on Autoscaling to Launch replacement | ✅ Proactive | | Instance type diversification for On-Demand Failover | ❌ | ❌ (Single instance type from Launch Template) | ✅ (Same diversification as Spot) | | Automated Spot product handling | ❌ | ❌ | ✅ | | Main deployment region | N/A | ❌ (N. Virginia only) | ✅ (Any region) | | Parallel instance type replacement | N/A | ❌ | ✅ | | Recent instance type coverage | N/A | ❌ | ✅ | | Auto-update instance type information | If using attribute based selection | ❌ | Optional | | Savings reports email | ❌ | ❌ | ✅ | | Relax EBS bandwidth checks for increased diversification | N/A | ❌ | ✅ | | Reuse ASG Launch Template when launching Spot instances | N/A | ❌ | ✅ | | Support Autoscaling Groups with a Mixed Instances Policy | ✅ | ❌ (silently fails for such groups) | ✅ | | Costs | Free (AWS Service) | Free and open source | 5% of savings from OnDemand |

About AutoSpotting

AutoSpotting is the leading open source spot market automation tool, optimized towards quick/easy/frictionless adoption of EC2 Spot instances at any scale.

Since its launch in 2016, it's being used by thousands of users around the world, companies of all shapes and sizes, in aggregate saved them in the hundreds of millions of dollars so far as per our current estimations.

It is usually set up to monitor existing long-running AutoScaling groups, replacing their instances with Spot instances, with minimal configuration changes.

Often all it needs is just tagging the AutoScaling groups with spot-enabled=true, (in some cases even that can be avoided), yielding the usual 60%-90% Spot cost savings but in a better integrated and easier to adopt way than other alternative tools and solutions.

It is particularly useful if you have a large footprint that you want to migrate to Spot quickly due to management pressure but with minimal effort and configuration changes.

Demo

Here's a demo of AutoSpotting and the way it integrates with the new Spot Savings Estimator GUI. (Click to open on YouTube)

Guiding principles

Customer-focused, designed to maximize user benefits and reduce adoption friction
Safe and secure, hosted in your AWS account and with minimal required set of IAM permissions
Auditable OSS code base developed in the open
Inexpensive, easy to install and supported builds offered through the AWS Marketplace, with comprehensive support and additional features geared towards production usage at scale.
Simple, minimalist implementation

Benefits compared to alternatives

automated failover to OnDemand instances in the event of lost Spot capacity
automated instance type selection for Spot diversification without configuration changes from a standard OnDemand setup, and no vendor lock-in
bias towards cheapest AND newest instance types

How does it work?

Once installed and enabled to run against existing on-demand AutoScaling groups, AutoSpotting gradually replaces their on-demand instances with cheaper spot instances that are at least as large and identically configured to the group's members, without changing the group launch configuration in any way. You can also keep running a configurable number of on-demand instances given as percentage or absolute number and it automatically fails over to on-demand in case of spot instance terminations.

Going forward, as well as on any new ASGs that match the expected tags, any new on-demand instances above the amount configured to be kept running will be immediately replaced with spot clones within seconds of being launched.

If this fails temporarily due to insufficient spot capacity, AutoSpotting will continuously attempt to replace them every few minutes until successful after spot capacity becomes available again.

When launching Spot instances, the compatible instance types are chosen by default using a the capacity-optimized-prioritized allocation strategy, which is given a list of instance types sorted by price. This configuration offers a good tradeoff between low cost and significantly reduced interruption rates. The lowest-price allocation strategy is still available as a configuration option.

A single installation can handle all enabled groups from an entire AWS account in parallel across all available AWS regions, but it can be restricted to fewer regions if desired in certain situations.

Your groups will then monitor and use these Spot instances just like they would do with your on-demand instances. They will automatically join their respective load balancer and start receiving traffic once passing the health checks, and the traffic would automatically be drained on termination.

See this video for more imformation on AutoSpotting. https://youtu.be/foobAmWpexI

What savings can I expect?

The savings it generates are in the 60-90% range usually seen when using spot instances, but they may vary depend

AutoSpotting

Install / Use

README