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Viewing Spot Price History
The Spot price represents the price above which you have to bid to guarantee that a single Spot request is fulfilled. When your bid is above the Spot price, your Spot Instance is launched, and if the Spot price rises above your bid price, your Spot Instance is terminated. You might choose to bid above the current Spot price so that your Spot request is fulfilled quickly. However, before specifying a price with which you want to bid for your Spot Instance, we recommend that you view the Spot price history. You can view the Spot price history for the last 90 days for any pool of Spot Instances sharing the same instance type, operating system, and Availability Zone.
For example, let's say you want to bid on a Linux/UNIX t1.micro instance to be launched in the
us-east-1 region. To view past prices in this Spot pool, specify these values using the Spot Price History
page of the AWS Management Console, the DescribeSpotPriceHistory API action, or ec2-describe-spot-price-history CLI command.
If you need to launch your Spot Instance in a specific Availability Zone, you can specify that Availability Zone when retrieving the Spot price history.
After you review the Spot price history, you might choose to bid at a price that would have given you 75 percent Spot Instance uptime in the past. Or, you might choose to bid two times the current Spot price because doing so would have given you 99 percent uptime in the past. However you frame your bid, keep in mind that past performance of Spot prices is not a guarantee of future results. Spot prices vary based on real-time supply and demand conditions, and the conditions that generated certain Spot prices or pricing patterns in the past may not repeat themselves in the future.
Note
Make sure you have set up the prerequisites for working with Amazon EC2. If you haven't, see Prerequisites for Using Spot Instances.
If you are using an API version earlier than 2011-05-15, the DescribeSpotPriceHistory action or the
ec2-describe-spot-price-history command will return the lowest price across the region for the given time period
and the prices will be returned in chronological order.
AWS Management Console
To view Spot Price history
From the Amazon EC2 console, click Spot Requests in the navigation pane.
The Spot Requests pane opens on the right. It will list your Spot requests if you have any.
At the top of the pane, click the Pricing History button.
The console displays the Spot Instance Pricing History page.
If you want to view the Spot price history for specific Availability Zones, click the Zone drop-down list and select an Availability Zone.
The Spot Instance Pricing History page displays the Spot Instance pricing history for all zones or the zone you selected.
Using the price history as a guide, select a price that you think would likely keep your instances running for the period of time you need.
Command Line Tools
To view Spot price history
Enter the following command:
PROMPT>ec2-describe-spot-price-history -H --instance-type m1.xlargeAmazon EC2 returns output similar to the following:
SPOTINSTANCEPRICE 0.384000 2011-05-25T11:37:48-0800 m1.xlarge Windows us-east-1b SPOTINSTANCEPRICE 0.384000 2011-05-25T11:37:48-0800 m1.xlarge Windows us-east-1d … SPOTINSTANCEPRICE 0.242000 2011-04-18T14:39:14-0800 m1.xlarge SUSE Linux us-east-1d SPOTINSTANCEPRICE 0.242000 2011-04-18T14:39:14-0800 m1.xlarge SUSE Linux us-east-1a
In this example, the price for the
m1.xlargeinstance type ranges between $0.242 and $0.384.Using the price history as a guide, select a price that you think would likely keep your instances running for the period of time that you need.
Tip
You can filter the Spot history data so it includes only instance types or dates of interest to you. For more information about how to filter the results, go to ec2-describe-spot-price-history in the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud Command Line Reference.
API
To view Spot price history
Construct the following Query request.
https://ec2.amazonaws.com/ ?Action=DescribeSpotPriceHistory &InstanceType=
instance_type&...auth parameters...Following is an example response.
<DescribeSpotPriceHistoryResponse xmlns="http://ec2.amazonaws.com/doc/2013-02-01/"> <spotPriceHistorySet> <item> <instanceType>m1.small</instanceType> <productDescription>Linux/UNIX</productDescription> <spotPrice>.28</spotPrice> <timestamp>2009-12-01T11:51:50.000Z</timestamp> <availabilityZone>us-east-1a</availabilityZone> </item> <item> <instanceType>m1.small</instanceType> <productDescription>Linux/UNIX</productDescription> <spotPrice>.28</spotPrice> <timestamp>2009-12-01T11:51:50.000Z</timestamp> <availabilityZone>us-east-1a</availabilityZone> </item> <item> <instanceType>m1.small</instanceType> <productDescription>Linux/UNIX</productDescription> <spotPrice>.31</spotPrice> <timestamp>2009-12-01T11:51:50.000Z</timestamp> <availabilityZone>us-east-1b</availabilityZone> </item> <item> <instanceType>m1.small</instanceType> <productDescription>Linux/UNIX</productDescription> <spotPrice>.30</spotPrice> <timestamp>2009-12-01T11:51:50.000Z</timestamp> <availabilityZone>us-east-1b</availabilityZone> </item> <item> <instanceType>m1.small</instanceType> <productDescription>Linux/UNIX</productDescription> <spotPrice>.25</spotPrice> <timestamp>2009-12-01T11:51:50.000Z</timestamp> <availabilityZone>us-east-1c</availabilityZone> </item> <item> <instanceType>m1.small</instanceType> <productDescription>Linux/UNIX</productDescription> <spotPrice>.28</spotPrice> <timestamp>2009-12-01T11:51:50.000Z</timestamp> <availabilityZone>us-east-1c</availabilityZone> </item> <item> <instanceType>m1.small</instanceType> <productDescription>Linux/UNIX</productDescription> <spotPrice>.35</spotPrice> <timestamp>2009-12-01T11:51:50.000Z</timestamp> <availabilityZone>us-east-1c</availabilityZone> </item> </spotPriceHistorySet> <nextToken/> </DescribeSpotPriceHistoryResponse>Using the price history as a guide, select a price that you think would likely keep your instances running for the period of time you need.
Tip
You can filter the Spot history data so it includes only instance types or dates of interest to you. For more information about how to filter the results, go to DescribeSpotPriceHistory in the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud API Reference.
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