Does this save much money compared to using Amazon's spot capacity? In the early days I remember the spot price closely tracked the "per operating hour" RI prices.<p>It would be a very nice feature if EC2 could incorporate each user's pool of reserved instances into their view of the spot market, but maybe that would create too much complexity on Amazon's side.
This is amazingly good info;<p>First - I've been seeking insight to how Netflix handles their footprint and what instance types they use. I dealt with these problems on a MUCH smaller scale (1K machines) but the challenges are the same...<p>Here is what I can derive from this info:<p>So given just 1500 idle Personalization R3.4xlarge instance for a given month -- if they did not use them, they were losing $265,140 per month on these instances (assuming a 36-month RI on these instances...) If they had these as no-upfront RIs -- then they are wasting $475,200 per month on these instances.<p>Obviously Netflix gets significant discounts on their RIs -- as far as I am aware the common customer will only get a discount of up to 5% off RIs after your initial $500K RI buy... im sure netflix has even better...<p>Anyway - as we dont know what the other instance types are that they use, if we were only to assume that the other 12K instances were the same and their utilization was only 50% of the day -- they would be wasting as little as $2MM/mo to as much as $3.8MM per month...<p>Finally - its great to see them mention specifically that the granularity of AWS is only hourly for instances - but their internal granularity is to the minute. The hourly granularity of AWS has been a thorn for some time. I certainly hope that Netflix will open source their spot manager at some point (Recall that AWS employees went out and started ClusterK with their spot manager, the Balancer, and then AWS came along and bought that little company up)....<p>There is <i></i><i>significant</i><i></i> value in being able to manage the spot market (your meta-version, like netflix, and AWS)....<p>What I would REALLY find interesting is if the Netflix Spot Manager were able to split and combine RIs and move them from zone to zone.<p>*Disclaimer: the napkin math above obviously does not take into account that the RIs and instances are in all regions - so the pricing will be much different and by region... but it does illustrate, even by those 1500 RIs how much money can be wasted on under-utilized instances.<p>Netflix could start a service offering batch jobs to other companies to utilize capacity if they wanted. 12K instances unused for even an hour is going to be say, $6,000/hour that could potentially be wasted...