Save on Compute Costs for Applications Deployed Using AWS Elastic Beanstalk with Amazon EC2 Spot Instances

1.5 — In the Application code section, select Sample application.

We will be using the sample application provided by Elastic Beanstalk for this example, but you can upload your own code as well.

Choose Create application.

1.7 — Once your application is deployed, you will be redirected to the Environments page showing the health and details of the deployed version of your application.

2.2 — On the Configurations overview page, choose the Edit button in the Capacity settings section.

2.3 — For Environment type, keep the default (Load balanced).

The application needs a minimum of 9 instances to function and should be able to scale up to 3x based on the load. Set the Min to 9 and Max to 27.

2.4 — We will use both On-Demand Instances and Spot Instances in our Auto Scaling group using the MixedInstancesPolicy. Select Combine purchase options and instances for Fleet composition. Leave the Default for Maximum spot price.

For more information on the MixedInstancesPolicy, see the Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling API Reference.

2.5 — Because the sample application is stateless and fault tolerant and can handle an instance being interrupted, we will mostly use Spot Instances, with a small number of On-Demand Instances to provide a consistent baseline of compute. Set the On-Demand base to 3. Set the On-Demand above base to 0%, which means anything above the three On-Demand base Instances will run Spot Instances.

2.6 — Selecting Instance types is an important part of following best practices when using EC2 Spot Instances with Auto Scaling groups. Because Spot Instances are spare On-Demand capacity and their availability at any given moment is dynamic and continually changes in real time, it’s important to be flexible with multiple instance families, sizes, and generations, and to use multiple Availability Zones. Set the Instance types to t2.large, t3a.large, t3.large, m5a.large, m5.large, m4.large, m6i.large, and m6a.large.

Note the instance types availability varies in Regions and if you don’t see an instance in the list, please select another instance that has similar specs.

Hint: You can go to EC2 Console > Instance types to find a list of instance types that meets your criteria by applying filters like vCPUs and Memory.

2.7 — Selecting multiple Availability Zones is important for high availability of the application and also follows EC2 Spot best practices. Select Any 3 for Availability Zones and select three Availability Zones from the dropdown for Placement.

2.8 — Leave the default setting for Scaling triggers and choose Apply.

3.1 — Once your environment is healthy, choose the load balancer URL for the application, as shown in the screenshot.

3.2 — Congratulations! You have successfully deployed an application using Elastic Beanstalk on EC2 Spot Instances.

4.1 — You can check the compute savings you realized by using EC2 Spot Instances for your application by going to EC2 console > Spot Requests > Savings summary.

5.1 — Although the Amazon EC2 Spot Instances are typically 70% to 90% less expensive than an On-Demand EC2 instance, it is still a good idea to clean up and delete resources once you have completed the tutorial.

Delete the Elastic Beanstalk application by selecting Applications > the application sample-nodejs-app -> Actions menu -> Delete application.

Enter the application name sample-nodejs-app to confirm and choose Delete.