How to Optimize Cloud Costs with Spot Instances: New on Cloud Academy

One of the main promises of cloud computing is access to nearly endless capacity. However, it doesn’t come cheap. With the introduction of Spot Instances for Amazon Web Services’ Elastic Compute Cloud (AWS EC2) in 2009, spot instances have been a way for major cloud providers to sell spare cloud capacity at considerable savings over on-demand instances. While this approach is not without its risks, the opportunity to capitalize on discounted capacity is one that organizations can’t ignore. With the right strategy and tools, cloud teams can take advantage of spot instances to optimize costs without risking downtime or availability.

Developed in partnership with Spotinst, our new course Optimizing Cloud Costs with Spot Instances prepares cloud teams to leverage excess cloud capacity from AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform to optimize costs.

How to Optimize Cloud Costs with Spot Instances

According to 451 Research, cloud costs are both the number-one motivator for moving to the cloud and the top pain point after migration. While spot instances can make the public cloud much more accessible and affordable, what really may be holding organizations back are fluctuating prices, the risk of workloads being terminated with little notice, and the complexity of options.

Costs are both the number-one motivator for moving to the cloud and the top pain point after migration.

To make the most of the spot instance opportunity, teams need to understand how the spot market works, the tools and services available, and what they can do to get the highest availability with the best pricing. In Optimizing Cloud Costs with Spot Instances, cloud teams will have everything they need to create a spot market strategy for their cloud workloads.

With this course, you will be able to:

  • Apply basic concepts of spare cloud capacity and compare spot instance offerings from major cloud providers
  • Use AWS Spot Instances and key AWS services including AWS Spot Advisor, RunInstances API, Spot Blocks, and Capacity and Spot Pools
  • Understand how spot prices are calculated and how to manage interruptions
  • Create your spot instance strategy for use with development and test environments, data processing with Amazon Elastic MapReduce (EMR), running task nodes as spot instances, container workloads for Kubernetes and Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS), and more

Optimizing Cloud Costs with Spot Instances is now available in the Cloud Academy library. Sign in to your Cloud Academy account to get started or register for your account today.

Optimizing Cloud Costs with Spot Instances

What to Learn Next

Create on-demand Amazon EC2 instances, auto-scale a spot fleet, work with Spot Bid Advisor and more in this hands-on lab, Using EC2 Spot Instances.

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