I mentioned in my earlier post that it would be interesting to compare prices between spot prices and traditional instance prices. The data is already available at http://cloudexchange.org/charts/us-east-1.linux.m1.small.html and it looks like spot prices are waaayy lower than traditional prices.
Stay tuned and it is going to be interesting how this pans out.
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Do we care about spot pricing? I mean, we basically have a set amount of instances we need to be highly available, and this won’t change based on pricing. Also, if our developers need to do some testing or qa work, they pretty much need to get it done right then. Their cost is much higher than the cost of compute, so making them wait until instance prices go down doesn’t really help us, does it? What am I missing?
Spot pricing is applicable best for background type jobs, which can be done over time. It doesnt really help us, today, but if we have long running lower priority jobs (such as web crawling, database warehousing etc,.), that is where we get the true value.