Support Spot Instances

[iangcarroll]

Testing costs could be lowered from 3 cents an hour to .003 cents an hour.

Edited to remove development from issue, tralamazza has a point

[tralamazza]

could be nice, but spot instances might be killed at any moment, good for fault tolerant tasks

[kamalmarhubi]

I have this on my mind as well. Not for development per se, but as a way to spin up a temporary big box at low cost without all this ec2rsi -t blah -f blah -p blah stuff, and without having to fit all the setup in just one file.

I'd be willing to take a stab at implementation but I need to learn a bit more about Vagrant's architecture. In particular, it would be preferable to me to specify the price limit and instance type on the command line, but I don't know if providers can specify their own command line options.

[mitchellh]

I think this would be perfect for Vagrant-style development where creating a dev environment can be "cheap"

I'd love to look into this.

[tralamazza]

I looked into spot instance requests, they are extremely slow (5 to 10 minutes sometimes). I have a prototype implementation which records a spot request id in the data_dir. I don't know if that is the correct approach. Maybe the simplest would be to implement separate commands for that.

[kamalmarhubi]

Oh great! I was going to look into this later this week because it's something I really want: an easier interface for one-off spot instances to do big crunching. Can you throw your code up into a branch on your fork?

[kamalmarhubi]

@tralamazza Bumpity bump! Do you think you'll keep going with yours?

[alexgorbatchev]

👍

[tralamazza]

I will push my work here https://github.com/tralamazza/vagrant-aws/tree/spot_commands

[kamalmarhubi]

Thanks! I'll take a look when I get some time. Are you still working on it?

[tralamazza]

I have a working version here.
To use it you must specify the spot_max_price and set spot_instance to true.

# ...
aws.region_config "eu-west-1" do |region|
  # ...
  region.spot_instance = true
  region.spot_max_price = "0.2"
end

$> vagrant up --provider=aws

Note: these are one-off spot requests.
Note2: this branch also contains PRs #31 and #93

[wutali]

+1

@mitchellh Do you have a plan to merge this feature from the @tralamazza 's branch?
If there is something to do, I wanna contribute it.

[nabeken]

👍

[tralamazza]

Anyone tried this patch? Any feedback?

[nabeken]

@tralamazza I tried your changes and it works well. I fixed a minor problem at nabeken@86ff6b6

A parallel acceptance test with a combination of vagrant-aws + spot instance + Jenkins dramatically accelerates the tests and also keeps down costs:satisfied:

[tralamazza]

@nabeken nice! thanks.