Allows customers to bid on unused capacity, enabling lower costs and
access to significant short-term capacity for those with flexibility in
when their applications can run
SEATTLE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Dec. 14, 2009--
Amazon Web Services LLC, an Amazon.com company (NASDAQ: AMZN), today
announced Spot Instances, a new option for purchasing and consuming
Amazon EC2 compute resources. With Spot Instances, customers bid on
unused Amazon EC2 capacity and run those instances for as long as their
bid exceeds the current Spot Price. The Spot Price changes periodically
based on supply and demand, and customers whose bids exceed it gain
access to the available Spot Instances. Spot Instances are complementary
to On-Demand Instances and Reserved Instances, providing another way to
obtain Amazon EC2 compute capacity. To get started using Amazon EC2 Spot
Instances, visit http://aws.amazon.com.
Spot Instances are well-suited for applications that can have flexible
start and stop times such as image and video conversion and rendering,
data processing, financial modeling and analysis, web crawling and load
testing. By being flexible on when their instances run, coupled with the
ability to bid what they’re willing to pay for capacity, customers can
significantly lower their Amazon EC2 costs. In addition, Spot Instances
can provide access to large amounts of additional capacity for
applications with urgent needs. When these needs arise, users can
specify a higher maximum bid, which will raise the priority of a request
for capacity.
To use Spot Instances, customers place a Spot Instance request,
specifying the instance family, size and the region they desire as well
as the number of Spot Instances they want to run and the maximum price
they’re willing to pay per instance. If a customer’s maximum price
exceeds the current Spot Price, the customer’s instances will run until
they choose to terminate the instances or their maximum bid falls below
the Spot Price (whichever is sooner). Like other Amazon EC2 instances,
Spot Instances can be terminated when they are no longer needed. If the
Spot Price goes above a user’s maximum bid and the instance is
terminated by Amazon EC2, the user will not be charged for any partial
hour of usage.
"As customers continued to expand their use of AWS, they started asking
if additional pools of capacity were available, even if only for a few
hours at a time. Some customers were looking to reduce costs in exchange
for being flexible as to when they run their application; others told us
they were willing to pay more when they had urgent, high volume needs,”
said Peter De Santis, General Manger of Amazon EC2. “Because of the
dynamic nature of supply and demand in the Amazon EC2 environment, we
developed Spot Instances to let customers take advantage of our unused
capacity while specifying a price they are willing to pay."
Spot Instances run the same software images and come in the same compute
instance families and sizes as both On-Demand and Reserved Instances, so
users can easily move between the purchasing options that best meet the
needs of their application. On-Demand Instances allow you to pay a fixed
rate by the hour with no commitment; Reserved Instances provide capacity
at a lower hourly rate in exchange for a low, one-time, upfront payment;
and Spot Instances provide the ability to bid whatever price you want on
unused capacity for applications with flexible start and end times.
Together, these three different purchasing models give users the
flexibility to optimize costs.
"Spot Instances and the Condor scheduler will enable a 'no compute cycle
left behind' policy for running scientific and financial calculations on
Amazon EC2," said Jason Stowe, CEO of Cycle Computing. "Our CycleCloud
service provides secure, elastic compute clusters on Amazon EC2, helping
our customers, including Eli Lilly, Varian Inc. and Pfizer, run
molecular modeling, next-generation sequencing and risk-analysis
calculations. With Spot Instances, CycleCloud can execute calculations
when the price is right, resulting in real cost management for our
clients."
“Clarity Solutions provides advanced investment platforms and advisory
services to financial institutions. We’re using On-Demand instances to
provide our clients with deep insight into opportunities and risks in
structured finance and credit derivatives markets,” said Adam Kirby, CEO
of Clarity Solutions. “We’re excited about Spot Instances because they
enable our clients to lower costs on batch processing and provide access
to a pool of resources for time-critical workloads. We see this as just
another example of how AWS is pioneering the future of cloud computing.”
“Spot Instances enable cost-efficient computing across the spectrum of
simulations run by our pharmaceutical and life sciences customers. We
can now run jobs that had previously been set aside as too expensive to
process,” said Chris Dagdigian, Founder and Director of Technology at
Bioteam, Inc. “With Spot Instances, those jobs are coming off the shelf
and further contributing to the product development process.”
About Amazon EC2
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (http://aws.amazon.com/ec2)
is a web service that provides resizable compute capacity in the cloud.
Amazon EC2's simple web service interface allows businesses to obtain
and configure capacity with minimal friction. It provides complete
control of your computing resources and lets you run on Amazon's proven
computing environment. Amazon EC2 reduces the time required to obtain
and boot new server instances to minutes, allowing you to quickly scale
capacity, both up and down, as your computing requirements change.
Amazon EC2 changes the economics of computing by allowing you to pay
only for capacity that you actually use.
About Amazon.com
Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ: AMZN), a Fortune 500 company based in Seattle,
opened on the World Wide Web in July 1995 and today offers Earth's
Biggest Selection. Amazon.com, Inc. seeks to be Earth's most
customer-centric company, where customers can find and discover anything
they might want to buy online, and endeavors to offer its customers the
lowest possible prices. Amazon.com and other sellers offer millions of
unique new, refurbished and used items in categories such as Books;
Movies, Music & Games; Digital Downloads; Electronics & Computers; Home
& Garden; Toys, Kids & Baby; Grocery; Apparel; Shoes & Jewelry; Health &
Beauty; Sports & Outdoors; and Tools, Auto & Industrial.
Amazon Web Services provides Amazon’s developer customers with access to
in-the-cloud infrastructure services based on Amazon's own back-end
technology platform, which developers can use to enable virtually any
type of business. Examples of the services offered by Amazon Web
Services are Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), Amazon Simple
Storage Service (Amazon S3), Amazon SimpleDB, Amazon Simple Queue
Service (Amazon SQS), Amazon Flexible Payments Service (Amazon FPS),
Amazon Mechanical Turk and Amazon CloudFront.
Amazon and its affiliates operate websites, including www.amazon.com,
www.amazon.co.uk,
www.amazon.de,
www.amazon.co.jp,
www.amazon.fr,
www.amazon.ca,
and www.amazon.cn.
As used herein, “Amazon.com,” “we,” “our” and similar terms include
Amazon.com, Inc., and its subsidiaries, unless the context indicates
otherwise.
Forward-Looking Statements
This announcement contains forward-looking statements within the meaning
of Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933 and Section 21E of the
Securities Exchange Act of 1934. Actual results may differ significantly
from management's expectations. These forward-looking statements involve
risks and uncertainties that include, among others, risks related to
competition, management of growth, new products, services and
technologies, potential fluctuations in operating results, international
expansion, outcomes of legal proceedings and claims, fulfillment center
optimization, seasonality, commercial agreements, acquisitions and
strategic transactions, foreign exchange rates, system interruption,
indebtedness, inventory, government regulation and taxation, payments
and fraud. More information about factors that potentially could affect
Amazon.com's financial results is included in Amazon.com's filings with
the Securities and Exchange Commission, including its most recent Annual
Report on Form 10-K and subsequent filings.
Source: Amazon.com, Inc.
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