Improved Pricing Control for Spot Instances Coming July 1st
We are excited to announce a new feature that will significantly increase your control over pricing for your Amazon EC2 Spot instances. With this change, we will introduce a Spot Instance price per Availability Zone rather than a Spot Instance price for an entire Region (covering all Availability Zones within the region). This improved pricing granularity will enable you to determine the price required to launch a Spot Instance into a specific Availability Zone.
With this announcement, we will now set the Spot price based on the supply and demand for a specific Availability Zone rather than Region, enabling you to determine the price required to launch a Spot instance into a particular Availability Zone. If you do not target your bids, you will have your instances automatically launched into the lowest priced Availability Zone available when the bid is fulfilled.
Given that this change may affect customer’s bidding strategies and how the DescribePriceHistory API works, we are providing lead time to modify your application. The API changes and supporting documentation are immediately available at http://aws.amazon.com/releasenotes/Amazon-EC2. Each Availability Zone’s Spot price will start to change independently based on supply and demand starting on July 1, 2011.
For more information about Amazon EC2 Spot Instances and experiences from customers using it, please visit the Amazon EC2 Spot Instance Web Page.