Select spot instances with Spot Advisor - Elastic Compute Service

Spot Advisor is a tool developed by Alibaba Cloud to facilitate the selection of Elastic Compute Service (ECS) spot instances. It provides data-driven support to help you identify spot instance types that meet your business requirements, balancing cost optimization and resource stability.

Features

Spot Advisor integrates real-time data query, historical data query, comparison, and purchase recommendation capabilities for spot instances.

Real-time data query: Spot Advisor displays each instance type's current market price (spot price), release rate, and historical discount rates in a specific zone. You can compare spot prices across different instance types and find the most cost-effective option.
Historical data query: Spot Advisor displays historical price trends for instance types in a specific zone to help you analyze price fluctuations and estimate long-term usage costs. You can compare historical price volatility across instance types and find consistently priced instance types.
Purchase recommendations: Spot Advisor filters and recommends optimal computing power combinations that meet your requirements, such as numbers of instances and vCPUs, based on your purchase goals (such as optimal capacity or costs).

Real-time data query

Use the ECS Console

Access the Spot Instances - Query Real-time Data tab.

Condition filtering: Supports quick filtering of instance types by criteria, such as region, zone, CPU or GPU, vCPU count, and memory size. You can also specify an instance type name to perform a fuzzy search.

Data information: Displays real-time information about instance types, including the spot prices, release rates, and historical discount rates.

Other features:

Purchase: Click Buy in the Actions column to purchase spot instances of a desired instance type on the instance buy page.
Historical price: Click Price History in the Actions column to view an instance type's spot price history.
Historical data comparison: Click the icon on the left of the Instance Family column to select up to five instance types for historical data comparison.

Call API operations

Query the spot price. Call the DescribePrice operation to query a spot instance's price. Sample request to query the price of a spot ecs.u1-c1m4.xlarge instance with a 1-hour protection period in Hangzhou Zone J:

RegionId:"cn-hangzhou", //Set the region to China (Hangzhou).
ZoneId:"cn-hangzhou-j", //Set the zone to Hangzhou Zone J.
ResourceType:"instance", //Set the resource type to instance.
InstanceType:"ecs.u1-c1m4.xlarge", //Set the instance type to ecs.u1-c1m4.xlarge.
SystemDisk:{
  Category:"cloud_essd_entry", //Set the system disk category to ESSD Entry disk.
  Size:40, //Set the system disk size to 40 GiB.
},
SpotStrategy:"SpotAsPriceGo", //Set the bidding strategy to automatic bidding.
SpotDuration:1 //Set the usage duration (protection period) to 1 hour.

Query the average release rate and historical discount rate. Call the DescribeSpotAdvice operation to query the average release rate and discount rate of spot instances. Sample request to query the average release rate and historical discount rate of spot ecs.u1-c1m4.xlarge instances in Hangzhou Zone J:
```
RegionId:"cn-hangzhou", //Set the region to China Hangzhou.
ZoneId:"cn-hangzhou-j", //Set the zone to Hangzhou Zone J.
InstanceType:"ecs.u1-c1m4.xlarge" //Set the instance type to ecs.u1-c1m4.xlarge.
```

Historical data query

Use the ECS console

Access the Spot Instances - Query Historical Data tab.

Condition filtering: Supports filtering by region and zone. You can click Add Instance Type to add up to five instance types to the comparison.

Data information:

Tab: displays spot instance information, such as Historical Average Price of Spot Instances and Average Release Rate in Last 30 Days.
Line chart: displays the historical hourly price trend and the lowest price and highest price for each selected instance type in the specified zone over a specific period. The default period is the last 7 days, with support for up to the last 30 days.

Other features:

Parameter comparison: Click View Detailed Parameter Comparison to view the detailed parameter comparison of the selected instance types.
Identification of low-price zones: Click Find Low-price Zones in an instance type card to view the historical hourly price trends of spot instances in different zones.
Purchase: Click Buy Now in an instance type card to purchase spot instances of the instance type on the instance buy page.

Call an API operation

Query historical prices. You can call the DescribeSpotPriceHistory operation to query the historical prices of spot instances. Sample request to query the historical prices of spot ecs.u1-c1m4.xlarge instances in Hangzhou Zone J:

RegionId:"cn-hangzhou", //Set the region to China (Hangzhou).
ZoneId:"cn-hangzhou-j", //Set the zone to Hangzhou Zone J.
NetworkType:"vpc", //Set the network type to Virtual Private Cloud (VPC).
InstanceType:"ecs.u1-c1m4.xlarge" //Set the instance type to ecs.u1-c1m4.xlarge.

Purchase recommendations

Access the Spot Instances - Recommended Instance Types tab.

Condition filtering: Configure Total Configurations and Purchase Policy, and specify filter conditions, such as the region, zone, and instance type or vCPU count and memory size, in the Filter Conditions section.

Note

Purchase Policy specifies a purchase strategy. Valid values:

Optimal Capacity: Recommends spot instance combinations with low prices, low release rates, and optimal overall capacity.
Optimal Cost-effectiveness: Recommends spot instance combinations with the lowest prices.
Balanced Distribution: Evenly distributes spot instances across multiple zones for disaster recovery purposes.

Data information: Displays information, such as spot prices, release rates, and historical discount rates, of recommended instance types filtered based on your total configurations, purchase policy, and selection conditions.

Other features:

Purchase: Click Buy in the Actions column to purchase spot instances of a desired instance type on the instance buy page.
Historical price: Click Price History in the Actions column to view an instance type's spot price history.
One-click creation: Click the icon on the left of the Instance Family column to select instance types, and then click Create to create spot instances on the Auto Provisioning -Create Instances page.

Usage recommendations

When using Spot Advisor, follow these recommendations:

Choose instance types with lower release rates. Check the release rates of instances and prioritize those with lower release rates to reduce the risk of interruption and reclamation.
Choose instance types with small historical price fluctuations. Query the historical prices of different instance types and choose those with smaller historical price fluctuations to reduce the risk of cost increases.
Choose multiple regions and zones. Deploy across multiple regions and zones to reduce the risk of single-point inventory issues.
Mitigate interruption and reclamation risks. Spot instances may be reclaimed at any time. We recommend building hybrid node pools with pay-as-you-go instances to improve stability.