A simple and easy to use tool designed to significantly lower your Amazon AWS costs by automating the use of spot instances.
When installed and enabled on an existing on-demand AutoScaling group, AutoSpotting clones one of your on-demand instances from the group with a spot instance that is cheaper, at least as large (automatically considering memory, CPU cores and disk volumes) and configured identically to it. Once the new spot instance is ready, it is attached to the group and an on-demand instance is detached and terminated to keep the group at constant capacity.
It continuously applies this process across all enabled groups from all regions gradually replacing your on-demand instances with much cheaper spot instances. For your peace of mind, you can also configure it to keep running a configurable number of on-demand instances given as percentage or absolute number.
Your groups will then monitor and use these spot instances just like they would do with your on-demand instances. They will automatically join your load balancer and start receiving traffic once passing the health checks.
The installation takes just a few minutes and the existing groups can be enabled and configured individually by using a few additional tags.
This can be seen in action below, you can click to expand the animation:
Read here for more information and implementation details.
Frequently asked questions about the project are answered in the FAQ, please read this first before asking for support.
If you have additional questions not covered there, they can be easily added to the crowdsourced source of the FAQ and we'll do our best to answer them either there or on Gitter.
Just like in the above animation, it's as easy as launching a CloudFormation (or
Terraform)
stack and setting the spot-enabled tag on the AutoScaling groups where you
want it enabled to true.
All the required infrastructure and configuration will be created automatically, so you can get started as fast as possible.
For more detailed information you can read this document
The above stack can be used to conveniently install the latest build generated automatically after each commit. Even though these builds are usually stable enough, they may not have been thoroughly tested yet and come with no warranty and only best effort community support.
The binaries (including the automated installation scripts) of the above stack are distributed under a proprietary license that allows them to be used free of charge for a limited evaluation period, no longer than 14 days. Further use is possible but requires the payment of a monthly fee for as long as you keep using them.
This fee should be at least 5% of the savings generated by the AutoSpotting software, and it can be paid on a monthly basis through Patreon.
The license also forbids non-paying users to automate the installation of these official builds on a recurring basis.
Carefully tested builds are also available. They come with support from the main author, who will do his best to help you configure and successfully run AutoSpotting on your environment.
Your feature requests and issues will also be treated with higher priority.
These builds require a fee of at least 10% of the monthly savings, also paid through Patreon on a monthly basis.
Please get in touch on gitter if you are interested in getting access to the stable builds.
It is always recommended to use the stable binaries mentioned above. But if you have some special needs or don't want to pay for long term use of the official binaries, you can always build and run your customized binaries that you maintain on your own, just keep in mind that those won't be supported in any way.
More details are available here
This project was developed by volunteers in their own spare time. If you find it useful, please consider contributing to its development, any amount of help would be greatly appreciated and would make a huge difference to the project.
The best way to help is by convincing your organization to use the official binaries but other equally appreciated ways you can help are trying it out and giving feedback, reporting bugs, writing code, improving the documentation, assigning a developer to work on it, or even just spreading the word.
Non-trivial code should be submitted according to the contribution guidelines.
You can also contribute financially, we gladly accept recurrent tips on Patreon, regardless of the amount.
Community support is available on the gitter chat room on a best effort basis, where the main authors and other users are likely to help you solve issues with the official binaries.
The main author also offers enterprise-grade support and will do as much as possible to help you out with any issues you may have, including with custom feature development. For more information feel free to get in touch on gitter.
Autospotting is already used by hundreds of individuals and organizations around the world. Some of them we know of are mentioned in the list of notable users.
The following deserve a special mention for contributing significantly to the development effort (listed in alphabetical order):
This software is distributed under the terms of the MIT license.
The official binaries are licensed under this proprietary license.