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I have a start-up company (USA) that will be running on AWS and have the idea to use ONLY Spot Instances (until further funding is acquired) for our initial 2-4 month launch in order to save the maximum amount of money by constantly monitoring our bid price...

Since Spot Instances are reclaimed within 2 minutes if your bid falls below the market price, what if I were to CONSTANTLY adjust my bid to be above market OR set the bid to an amount that the market price never reaches, which IS STILL A BIG DISCOUNT, by studying the market price history.

Also, just to be safe I could have a few small on-demand instances running as a fail-safe in two regions.

In that case, wouldn't I theoretically always save 1/4 - 1/3 the price of using solely Spot Instances?

Does anyone have experience with this??

THANK YOU

Jake Smith
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    Yeah, people do it. It's a lot of work to set up a resilient service on mostly spot. Depending on workload, serverless can be orders of magnitude cheaper than ec2. Prepay for reserved instances can also save up to 40% or more compared to on demand, not as cheap as spot, but easier to keep functioning – erik258 Feb 26 '22 at 15:03
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    Sometimes you will find spot capacity will exhaust of a type regardless of your bid. In order to do this effectively, mixed instance types is recommended. Have a look at spot fleets https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/spot-fleet.html – jordanm Feb 26 '22 at 17:31
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    There is no need to keep adjusting your bid. You will only pay the Spot Price, even if you bid more. So, simply bid the maximum you are willing to pay and you will only be charged the Spot Price. However, AWS can still terminate Spot Instances if it needs the capacity, regardless of what you are willing to bid. Therefore, do not assume that instances will always be running. Your best strategy is to use a mix of Instance Types across multiple Availability Zones -- that way, they won't all be terminated at the same time. There are companies like spot.io who manage this this for you. – John Rotenstein Feb 27 '22 at 00:23

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