AWS Summit SF

20 Apr 2017

I was able to sneak away to San Francisco this week and attend the AWS summit.

One of the hot topics was serverless architecture and there were a lot of great talks on AWS lambda (some talks can be found here). Additionally there were some cool deep dives into EC2 performance. The biggest takeaways were some of the most obvious; 1) keep your OS and packages up to date. 2) Pick the right instance for your workload (compute/memory/io/etc optimized).

The last thing I was exposed to that I need to look into are EC2 spot fleets. I did some napkin math and a 12+ cluster of t2.nanos could cost ~$5 which would be fun to play with. Essentially you set a bid price for unused EC2 instances to get deep (up to 90%) discounts. Spot instances combined with Lambda APIs could be the base for cheeeeap infrastructure.

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