You don’t have to break the bank trying to manage the infrastructure side of Black Friday.
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As the holiday season approaches, the irresistible Black Friday and Cyber Monday offers are expected to attract millions of customers, generating billions in sales. The long queues, crowd pushing, and competitive jostling for the most in-demand buys may have been reasonable deterrents before. But not anymore! People can snag their desired deals from the comfort of their homes or virtually anywhere through online shopping. This trend has steadily gained traction over the years, with around 68% of consumers expected to shop online this holiday season.
As the allure of grand savings draws in customers in troves, industries such as e-commerce, banking, and fintech find themselves grappling to meet the surge in networking and computing demand. For e-commerce, Black Friday is the busiest time of the year, where a one-second delay in load time roughly costs a 7% loss in conversions and an 11% loss in pageviews. A full-blown outage is out of the question. Big brands like Walmart, Lowe’s, and GameStop have all lost customer loyalty and millions in revenue to outages and slow load times, simply because their infrastructure was not sufficiently prepared for Black Friday traffic surges. While the cloud promises high availability and elastic scalability precisely for such peak seasons, businesses must implement strategic approaches to keep the operations running smoothly without incurring exorbitant costs.
A spot instance is a virtual server provided by cloud computing services, such as AWS, GCP, and Microsoft Azure, offering the cloud’s unused or spare computing capacity at significantly discounted pricing compared to typical on-demand virtual server instances. Each Cloud Service Provider (CSP) has its own terminology for spot instances, for example, it’s spot instance in AWS, spot VMs in Azure and GCP. There may be slight variations in the mechanics of spot instances across clouds; however, the fundamental concept remains the same — spare capacity at lower prices.
So, how do spot instances work? When there is excess capacity in the cloud provider's infrastructure, spot instances become available. Users can place bids on the price they’re willing to pay per hour for a spot instance. The hourly price for a spot instance at any given time is called the spot price, and it’s determined based on the supply and demand for the spare capacity at that time.
With spot instances, you can lower your cloud costs by up to 90%. The catch? Your CSP can terminate the instance almost abruptly if the capacity is needed elsewhere or if the spot price exceeds the amount you bid. Naturally, this makes spot instances a bit tricky to work with. This is especially true for peak shopping seasons like Black Friday or Amazon Prime Day when many businesses scale out their systems, and the available capacity in certain zones and regions can fluctuate drastically. The spot pricing may even rise above on-demand instance pricing, and before you know it, your cloud bill could surpass the budget you estimated.
Keeping track of available spot instances, their fluctuating prices, and comparing them with on-demand instance pricing can become complicated, especially in multi-cloud setups where you're dealing with several CSPs. Without vigilance, spot instances can lead to skyrocketing cloud spend and costly interruptions in business operations. As such, you need meticulous planning and a touch of automation to optimize the use of spot instances and keep them from turning into CloudOps’ worst nightmare.
Interruptions are inevitable with spot instances. Typically, CSPs can pull the plug on spot instances with as little as a 30 second notice. That’s just a fraction of the time it takes to set up a new on-demand instance, let alone finding the next available spot instance manually. The only way to prepare for the unpredictability of spot instance availability and pricing is to have an automated mechanism in place to switch from spot instances to on-demand instances or other available spot instances as needed.
Automation can allow you to choose how much of your workload runs on spot instances and configure fall back mechanisms for switching to on-demand instances when spot instances become too expensive or unavailable. You can use cloud provider auto-scaling tools and features like AWS Rebalance events to manage workloads in clusters across a pre-specified mix of uninterruptible standard instances and spot instances. However, cloud-specific tools do not work across all clouds in a multi-cloud set up, leading to sub-optimal utilization of spot instances across all clouds. It’s better to opt for a cloud-agnostic tool for managing your spot instance strategy across all CSPs.
The emma platform is a no-code multi-cloud management application that centralizes management and cost optimization across multiple clouds. You get a single wizard for finding the least expensive spot instances in any region across all integrated clouds. Simply choose your preferred location for deployment along with the required VM specifications, and the emma platform will display the cheapest available options from all major CSPs — no coding required.
Even a second of downtime during the high-stakes Black Friday sale can have your customers turn to your competitors. Still, you don’t have to break the bank trying to manage the infrastructure side of Black Friday. Spot instances are cheap, and with the emma platform’s click-and-go model, finding the right ones is easy. So, while you plan your Black Friday offers and discounts, also tap into the emma platform to orchestrate your spot instance strategy for high availability and optimal cost savings.