COVID-19 – Cloud Availability and Cost Management

With the brick and mortar world shutting down due to Covid-19, our lives have literally moved online. With many applications and services running in the cloud, there is a massive strain not just on internet bandwidth. But also on cloud compute resources.

So much that the EU asking Netflix and YouTube to stop streaming HD content, Zoom (which runs in part on AWS) seeing their daily users x4 as well as Google Hangouts usage are rocketing.

It becomes much more challenging now to ensure high availability while driving cloud-cost efficiency especially when more traffic and usage doesn’t always translate into more revenue. Spot and Renova Cloud are partnering to help you best leveraging your cloud compute capacity and automating your workload provisioning.

 

Challenges with managing lower-cost reserved capacity and spot instances

Usually, many companies are looking to reduce costs will turn to long-term commitment, compute-pricing options such as reserved instances and savings plans. However, with Covid-19’s impact still unknown, financial lock-in for 1 or 3 years can be a risky proposition.

Leveraging cloud providers’ highly affordable, excess capacity, such as AWS’s spot instances, is attractive with zero lock-in. But the current, sustained spike in cloud consumption has made it extremely difficult to provision and hold onto spot instances. We’ve seens many companies, some who have tried the “do-it-yourself” approach of leveraging spot instances, needing for help.

Let’s take a closer look at the spot instance market in today’s climate. And how you can successfully run your workloads, from single, stateful instances, to cloud-native clusters made up of thousands of nodes, affordably and reliably.

 

Unprecedented cloud market congestion

Since February 2020 with the marked escalation facing the Covid-19, we have seen the highest levels ever recorded of congestion across all AWS markets. This surge in online activity has even surpassed holiday periods that usually peak between October and December. Not only are more resources going up on our platform. We also see many AWS customers moving to spot instance markets as they look to increase savings from their infrastructure during this economically uncertain time.  With more people at home, ordering, working and living life online, cloud computing resources are at a premium.

spot instance interruptions in a single region

Spot instance replacement levels from April 2019 – April 2020. While this graph shows data from a single AWS region. It is representative of the trend we see in other AWS regions.

Peeking under the hood – how Spot.io maintains high availability while keeping costs low

Spot has years of experience maintaining high availability for mission-critical applications during Black Friday, Cyber Monday and other cyclical spikes. You can be well-prepared for keeping cloud costs within budget all while handling extreme cloud market volatility.

Here is how Spot does it:

  • More data = better decisions. Continuous, long-term monitoring of ALL spot instance markets, provides a broader data-set than just looking at the current “point-in-time” status of a particular spot instance market. This enables us to choose the most viable spot instances with the greatest potential longevity. Additionally, our ability to match your resource requirements (e.g. vCPU) to the broadest selection of instance families. Combined with the above-mentioned view of all spot instance markets’ health, enables us to make the best decisions for workload placement.
  • Proactive spot instance replacements. In the event of a potential spot instance interruption, we proactively replace the affected instance(s) from the congested markets well in advance, allowing for graceful draining and seamless continuation of the workloads in a less congested spot instance market.
  • Optimized usage of spot instances, on-demand instances and reserved capacity. In scenarios where there are no available spot instances, your workload will automatically fall back to on-demand instances. Once relevant spot instances become available, your workload is returned to those spot instances for maximum savings. In the event that you have unused reserved instances or savings plans, workloads will be prioritized to run on them, but will revert to spot instances whenever that will help maximize overall cost-efficiency.

For a full understanding of how you can use Spot to help you during Covid-19, Contact Us.

COVID-19 – Cloud Availability and Cost Management