πŸ“Œ Which instance type to choose for AWS Elastic Kubernetes Service(EKS) workload On-demand vs. Spot instance πŸ“Œ

πŸ“š To read the complete blog https://www.101daysofdevops.com/courses/100-days-of-aws/lessons/day-48/

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πŸ™‹β€β™‚οΈThis simple answer to this question is if your application can handle the interrupt, then choose Spot Instance else, go with on-demand, and that still holds true. But I did a small experiment by spinning up 100 pods using Elastic Kubernetes Service(EKS) first via on-demand and then using spot, and the result was somewhat surprising.

βœ… Why spot instance?

πŸ’° Spot instances are 70–90% cheaper as compared to on-demand instance

❌ Why don’t you choose spot instance?

πŸ”™ If AWS needs a capacity back there will give you 2 min interruption notice and terminate the instance.

πŸ§ͺ The experiment I performed by spinning up 100 pods using Elastic Kubernetes Service(EKS) first via on-demand and then using spot

Figure 1: The drawing shows how long it takes to scale from 0 to 100 pods. As you can see, on-demand is better at the start, but after 3 min, in the case of both on-demand and spot, the 100 pods are up and running.

πŸ”¬ The test I ran is pretty basic, with a sample size of 100 pods and a simple Kubernetes manifest, which may not be enough, but the point I am trying to drive here is that I got the spot capacity pretty quickly. In future, I will try with a greater number of pods, but I need to be mindful of πŸ’°πŸ’΅ πŸ’³

🧐 So, with 70–90% lesser cost, I can run the same amount of pods. But the question remains the same what if my workload got interrupted? If I find out the nice handy-dandy tool called eventbridge-cli through which you can capture spot interruption notices https://github.com/spezam/eventbridge-cli

β˜‘Also, in the case of Kubernetes, if you want to determine which of your worker node is spot vs. on-demand, run the below command

πŸ”₯ If you are interested to know what is the recommended instance types based on resource criteria like vcpus and memory, you can use the tool ec2-instance-selector https://github.com/aws/amazon-ec2-instance-selector

❓So still, there are some open questions

β“΅ Do bidding still exist in spot instance world 🌎

β‘‘ Is the concept of overbid still exist, i.e., if someone bids 1 cent more, then my current bid will aws interrupt my instance

β“· What are the chances of getting an old vs. a new instance type? I believe the old instance type is readily available compared to the new one.

πŸ™‹β€β™‚οΈ There is no right or wrong answer to these questions, but the reason I am asking these questions is that I have been running eventbridge-cli for close to a week now to catch spot interruption, and none of my spot instances got interrupted(maybe I am lucky πŸ•Ί) but still can someone share there experience

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AWS Community Builder, Ex-Redhat, Author, Blogger, YouTuber, RHCA, RHCDS, RHCE, Docker Certified,4XAWS, CCNA, MCP, Certified Jenkins, Terraform Certified, 1XGCP

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Prashant Lakhera

AWS Community Builder, Ex-Redhat, Author, Blogger, YouTuber, RHCA, RHCDS, RHCE, Docker Certified,4XAWS, CCNA, MCP, Certified Jenkins, Terraform Certified, 1XGCP