In-house AWS spot strategy to optimize price & performance: an In-Depth review

Abstract:

AWS cloud offers tremendous opportunities to tailor the infrastructure to ones needs. It is possible to choose compute resources with varying performance characteristics (e.g., m1.large vs. c3.xlarge), different pricing models (reserved vs. on-demand), and different levels of reliability (reserved vs. spot). Providing high performance at low cost in AWS can be achieved by intelligently choosing what’s best for the application(s) at hand. In this talk, I will present tips and tricks for optimizing DevOps within AWS deployments.

The talk will focus on Yactraq, a video processing company, and how they are cutting their costs by 65%+ on average using an approach that leverages the spot instance market. Yactraq can’t choose the timing of their spot instance use: their end-customer application facing real-time APIs mean they MUST deliver constant performance, continuous delivery at near 100% uptime and meet a performance SLA.

The capacity demand of the system is volatile as it not only depends on the number of API calls from customers, but also the length and quality of the videos being processed. Yactraq sees sudden surges of demand that are as high as 70x typical demand. A priority for Yactraq’s IT department is managing how high performance computing can be balanced with costs and variations in demand.

Their solution now automatically applies AWS Spot strategies, keeping costs down and performance up and dipping into reserved instances as needed. After successfully processing more than 60-million seconds of video,the solution has lowered the on-demand price for Yactraq by 80%, compared to a 64% overall savings previously.

Speaker:

Ali Hussain, CTO & Co-Founder at Flux7 Inc, has been designing scalable and distributed systems for the last decade. He acquired his passion for distributed systems while earning his MS at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His current interests in Flux7 are in Enterprise Migration and AWS Spot instances.

Twitter: @Ali_A_Hussain LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/aliasgharhussain AWS Certified Solutions Architect and AWS Certified Developer