SpotMe

A command line tool that allows you to spin up AWS EC2 Spot Instances instantly

Background

I do a lot of computation, but my computer is pretty crappy, so often I have to spin up ec2 spot instances to do some computation. Spot Instances are a good resource to use AWS EC2 instances for fairly cheap, and I am very frugal. I created this tool because I didn't want to have to develop something on my commandline, go to my browser and create a spot instance, then go back to my commandline to rsync/scp everything up. This tool allows me to stay in my commandline the whole way.

If you want to know how much spot prices are for specific regions historically, you should try spotcheck

Installation

To install, simply run

pip3 install --user spotme

Setup

Since spotcheck uses boto3, you'll have to setup the same way. You can view the docs here

A sample config file that is to be placed in ~/.aws/config is also in this repository.

Usage

To use, run

spotme

and a series of questions will be prompted. The questions will be of the form

Instance Type [t2.micro]:
Spot Price: 0.006    
Instance Count [1]:
Availability Zone [ca-central-1a]:                                          
Launch Image Id [ami-d29e25b6]:  
Security Group, pick from:                                           
        sg-xxxxxxxx(Some Security Group)
        sg-yyyyyyyy(default)                                              
Default is [sg-xxxxxxxx]:                              
Key-Pair Name, pick from:        
        the-one-keypair
Default is [the-one-keypair]:

The result is of the form

Launching spot states sir-123abcde

+---------------------+---------------+---------------+
| Instance Id         | Public IP     | Private IP    |
+---------------------+---------------+---------------+
| i-05f10faefc833c643 | x.x.x.x       | x.x.x.x       |
+---------------------+---------------+---------------+

Repeatable Usage

If you don't want to enter the CLI prompt every time, you can run the CLI with the options

spotme --InstanceType=t2.micro --SpotPrice=0.006 --InstanceCount=1 --AvailabilityZone=ca-central-1a --LaunchImageId=ami-d29e25b6 --SecurityGroup=sg-123abcd --KeyName=yourkeypair

Version

• 1.2.0

  • Added Key-pair name

• 1.1.0

  • Added customization security group

• 1.0.x

  • Fix Bugs

• 1.0.0

  • First publish