We use Kubernetes and spot instances to reduce EC2 billing up to 80%

Feb 20, 2020 • permalinkThis is the story behind my talk: “Cloud Cost Optimization at Scale: How we use Kubernetes and spot instances to reduce EC2 billing up to 80%”.Now before I tell this story, I will admit first hand that the actual number is lower than 80%.The story began in mid 2015 when I was employed by one of my ex-employer. And they take some cut from it.Spotinst automates cloud infrastructure to improve performance, reduce complexity and optimize costs.Spot instances are very cheap (think 70-90% cheaper vs on-demand) EC2 offering from AWS but comes with a small problem: it can goes away anytime with just 2 minutes notice.I thought if we can design our workload to be fault tolerant and gracefully shutdown, spot instances will make perfect sense. And it’s more doable with smaller startups with only 1 ops guy.And that is my story behind the talk: “Cloud Cost Optimization at Scale: How we use Kubernetes and spot instances to reduce EC2 billing up to 80%”.Update: #1 on HackerNews.