When Clouds Stop Raining Discounts: Surviving the Drought

We seemed to be all set in terms of AWS cost optimization–we had just finished migrating our largest, most costly services to the less expensive Graviton architecture and our projected savings forecasts for the year were looking fantastic. That is until March, when drastic changes in the AWS Spot market overturned all of our underlying assumptions. Suddenly, our “cheaper” machines were costing more and most of our discounts completely disappeared by the end of April. The unthinkable had happened and we had no idea if it was temporary or the new normal.

This talk will explore the most likely underlying causes of the AWS Spot market instability, the tools and techniques we used to see the full view of its effects on discounts, and the major actions that we took to keep our infrastructure costs under control when faced with increasing uncertainty.