AutoSpotting is the leading open source spot market automation tool, optimized towards quick/easy/frictionless adoption of the EC2 spot market at any scale.
It takes over existing long-running ASGs with minimal configuration changes(usually just tagging them, but even that can be avoided), yielding the usual 70%-90% cost savings on compute but in a better integrated, more cost effective and easier to adopt way than the commercial SaaS alternatives in this space and for some mass adoption use cases it's even a better fit than the current native AWS offerings.
Once installed and enabled (usually by tagging) on 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. For your peace of mind, 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 keept will be immediately replaced with spot clones within seconds of being launched. If this fails due to insufficient spot capacity, the usual cron events will replace them later once spot capacity becomes available again. When launching Spot instances, the compatible instance types are attempted in increasing order of their price, until one is successfully launched.
This process can partly be seen in action below, you can click to expand the animation:
Additionally, it implements some complex logic aware of spot and on demand prices, including for different spot products and configurable discounts for reserved instances or large volume customers. It also considers the specs of all instance types and automatically places bids to instance types and prices chosen based on flexible configuration set globally or overridden at the group level using additional tags, but these overrides are often not needed.
A single installation can handle all enabled groups from an AWS account in parallel across all available AWS regions, but it can be restricted to fewer regions if desired.
Your groups will then monitor and use these spot instances just like they would do with your on-demand instances. They will automatically join your load balancer and start receiving traffic once passing the health checks, and the traffic would automatically be drained on termination.
The savings it generates are often in the 60-80% range, depending on region and instance type, but sometimes even up to 90% of on-demand prices, like you can see in the graph below.
The entire logic described above is implemented in a set of Lambda functions deployed using CloudFormation or Terraform stacks that can be installed and configured in just a few minutes.
The stack assigns them the minimal set of IAM permissions required for them to work and requires no admin-like cross-account permissions. The entire code base can be audited to see how these permissions are being used and even locked down further if your audit discovers any issues. This is not a SaaS, there's no component that calls home and reveals any details about your infrastructure.
The main Lambda function is written in the Go programming language and the code is compiled as a static binary compressed and uploaded to S3. For evaluation or debugging purposes, the same binary can run out of the box locally on Linux machines or as a Docker container on Windows or macOS. Some people even run these containers on their existing Kubernetes clusters assuming the other resources provided by the stack are implemented in another way on Kubernetes.
The stack also consists of a few CloudWatch event triggers, that run the Lambda function periodically and whenever it needs to take action against the enabled groups. Between runs your group is entirely managed by AutoScaling (including any scaling policies you may have) and load balancer health checks, that can trigger instance launches or replacements using the original on-demand launch configuration.
Read here for more information and implementation details.
Frequently asked questions about the project are answered in the FAQ, please read this first before asking for support.
If you have additional questions not covered there, they can be easily added to the source of the FAQ by editing in the browser and creating a pull request, and we'll answer them while reviewing the pull request.
Just like in the above animation, it's as easy as launching a CloudFormation (or
Terraform)
stack and setting the (configurable) spot-enabled tag on the AutoScaling
groups where you want it enabled to true.
All the required infrastructure and configuration will be created automatically, so you can get started as fast as possible.
For more detailed information you can read this document
- the binaries launched by this stack are distributed under a proprietary license, and are free to use for evaluation, up to $1000 monthly savings. Once you reach this limit you'll need to either switch to the inexpensive supported binaries (designed to cost a small fraction of around 1% of your total savings for supporting further development), or you can build your own binaries based on the open source code and run it for free.
Community support is available on the gitter chat room, where the main authors and other users are likely to help you solve issues.
Note: This is offered on a best effort basis and under certain conditions, such as using the latest version of the evaluation binaries.
If you need help for a large scale rollout or migrating from alternative tools/solutions, you can purchase a comprehensive support plan guaranteed to save you lots of time and money, you can always get in touch on gitter if you need such help.
Unlike multiple commercial products in this space that cost a lot of money and attempt to lock you in, this project is fully open source and developed in the open by a vibrant community of dozens of contributors.
We urge you to support us on Github Sponsors if this software helps you save any significant amount of money, this will greatly help further development.
Financial sponsorship is voluntary, it's also fine if you just try it out and give feedback, report issues, improve the documentation, write some code or assign a developer to work on it, or even just spread the word among your peers who might be interested in it. Any sort of support would be greatly appreciated and would make a huge difference to the project.
Note: Non-trivial code should be submitted according to the contribution guidelines.
The source code is and will always be open source, so you can build and run it yourself, see how it works and even enhance it if you want.
But if you want to conveniently get started or update within minutes without setting up and maintaining a build environment or any additional infrastructure, we have pre-built evaluation binaries that will save you significant amounts of time and effort.
These can be used for evaluation purposes as long as the generated monthly savings are less than $1000. Once you reach this level you will need to either purchase an inexpensive stable build that doesn't have this limitation, and also comes with a support plan, or you can build AutoSpotting from source code.
The support license costs vary by group, region and AWS account coverage and can also be paid through Patreon.
Individuals and companies supporting the development of the open source code get free of charge support and stable build access for a year since their latest contribution to the project.
- even though these evaluation builds are usually stable enough, they may not have been thoroughly tested yet and come with best effort community support.
- the docker images available on DockerHub are also distributed under the same binary license and the costs are the same.
Carefully tested builds suitable for Enterprise use will be communicated to Patreon backers as soon as they join.
They come with support from the author, who will do his best to help you successfully run AutoSpotting on your environment so you can get the most out of it. The feature requests and issues will also be prioritized based on the Patreon tier.
Please get in touch on gitter if you have any questions about these stable builds.
It is recommended to use the evaluation or stable binaries, which are easy to install, support further development of the software and allow you to get support.
But if you have some special needs that require some customizations or you don't want to rely on the author's infrastructure or contribute anything for longer term use of the software, you can always build and run your customized binaries that you maintain on your own, just keep in mind that those won't be supported in any way.
More details are available here
Autospotting is already used by hundreds of individuals and organizations around the world and as per internal AWS information a significant(but undisclosed) percentage of all currently running spot instances were launched using it.
This software is distributed under the terms of the OSL-3.0 license.
The official binaries are licensed under this proprietary license.
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