New Console Feature – Spot Market Scoring

Users of our platform love the cost savings and availability that we provide with our technology. New users and current users alike sometimes have difficulty understanding how to optimally diversify their Elastigroup to ensure they have a large number of Spot markets. The more Spot markets available to your Elastigroup, the more options we have to provide you with cost savings on the various Spot types that you select. This is why we have created a visual aid that we call “Spot Market Scoring“.

How it works

From the Spotinst console select Elastigroups from the top menu then click on the Elastigroup that you would like to modify. Click on the actions menu on the top right and select “Edit Configuration”. Next, click on the “Compute” tab to see the new “Spot Market Scoring” widget. 

As you can see below, I only have one instance type and one availability zone configured for my Elastigroup. This equates to just one market that is available for Spot provisioning. On top of that, the instance that I have configured is only scored at 64 in terms of availability and cost.

In this situation, it’s likely that On-Demand instances are going to be cheaper than Spot. Let’s fix this by adding additional instance types. I have added m3.large since it’s just one size larger, and I’ve also added an m4.large since it is similarly sized.

As you can see, I have immediately tripled the markets available to me. The m3.large in us-west-2a is scored favorably at the moment but we still only have three markets. We can do better!

Above, I have selected two additional availability zones from the left. We have gone from one to nine total markets (3 AZs x 3 instance types) available to this Elastigroup! Spotinst will automatically determine which markets are best at the time of provisioning. Spot markets fluctuate over time so a market that scored over 80% today could be scored 60% next week. Let us determine which market to bid on for you and you’ll be happy to find that you will have both availability and great cost savings!

That’s it for today, we hope you like this new feature!