Amazon EKS adds support for EC2 Spot Instances in managed node groups
Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) now supports creating and managing Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) Spot Instances using Amazon EKS managed node groups following Spot best practices. This enables you to take advantage of the steep savings and scale that Spot Instances provide for interruptible workloads running in your Kubernetes cluster. Starting today, you can supply multiple instance types when creating a new Managed Node Group, further allowing you to enhance availability of your applications running on Spot.
Amazon EKS is a managed service that makes it easy for you to run Kubernetes on AWS. Spot Instances are spare EC2 capacity that offer steep discounts from On-Demand prices. Spot Instances are a great fit to run fault-tolerant applications on your Kubernetes clusters such as batch processing, Big Data ETLs using Apache Spark, and stateless API endpoints, because the scheduler provides built-in mechanisms to manage interruptions gracefully.
Until now, Amazon EKS customers had to manually configure Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling groups, manage graceful draining of Spot nodes, and upgrade the Spot nodes to latest Kubernetes versions. Now, managed node groups provide native support for Spot Instances. When creating a managed node group, simply set capacity type as SPOT and the multiple EC2 instance types that meet your resource requirements. Managed node groups provision and manage Spot nodes based on the latest Spot best practices. In particular, they enhance your node group's availability by enabling the capacity-optimized allocation strategy and Capacity Rebalancing on all Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling groups they manage.
You can create a managed node group with Spot capacity type through the Amazon EKS API, the Amazon EKS management console, eksctl, and by using infrastructure as code tools such as CloudFormation and Terraform. To get started, check out the launch blog and see the Amazon EKS documentation for more details. To learn more about Amazon EKS, visit the product page. To learn more about EC2 Spot Instances, visit the product page.