[StarCluster] AWS_REGION_NAME -- spot price problems

[Steve Darnell]

Hi Steve,

You want to define the "availability_zone" parameter for your cluster template: http://star.mit.edu/cluster/docs/latest/manual/configuration.html#cluster-settings

The prices you are observing are real, which clearly complicates spot usage. The spot market was essentially useless during the last Christmas season. Things seemed to stabilize a lot in mid-January. However, it is still very common to see a combination of volatile and stable zones for an instance type.

BTW, keep in mind that Amazon changes the zone's letter identifier between users. This can be an issue if you are using hard-coded logic to run clusters across multiple AWS accounts.

Best regards,
Steve

-----Original Message-----
From: starcluster-bounces at mit.edu [mailto:starcluster-bounces at mit.edu] On Behalf Of Stephen How
Sent: Thursday, October 03, 2013 5:03 PM
To: starcluster at mit.edu
Subject: [StarCluster] AWS_REGION_NAME -- spot price problems

Anyone,

The spot pricing for c1.xlarge on us-east-1 is all over the map lately.  Usually, it's $0.07/instance-hr, but lately it's as high as $1.00/instance-hr.

The price history is very steady on us-east-1b, but is all over the place for us-east-1a and us-east-1c.

Can I specify the us-east-1b zone via the AWS_REGION_NAME and AWS_REGION_HOST config fields?

Has anyone ever had problems with erratic spot instance prices?  Is this normal?  I've never seen this volatility in prices.  These prices don't seem real.

Thanks,
Steve
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