[chef] Re: Launching spot instances?

[Mike < >]

While the underlying library fog may provide this functionality, this
actually seems less useful to be part of the knife-ec2 command set.

`knife ec2 server create` attempts to create an instance, wait for it
to come up, bootstrap it via ssh, and start up chef-client (usually).

From what I garner, placing a spot request with a bid provide is not
ensured to be delivered at the time pf placing the request, and
therefore the flow of what "ec2 server create" does today would not be
the same, rather it seems like it would be: "If I can get a spot
request now, please give it to me, otherwise...?" Fail? The bid
request was probably placed, so this isn't a failure per se.

The other part of why I think this might not be a great idea is:  Spot
instances come up and down whenever their bid price is met or outbid
respectively. This can cause easy buildup of cruft in your node/client
list if you are allowing these to auto-register/validate themselves,
and then have to clean up after them once they are gone.

All in all, I think spot instances have a use case, but I don't know
if during ec2 server create (and subsequently bootstrap phase) makes
sense to support this.


On Wed, Oct 24, 2012 at 1:44 PM, Christopher J. Bottaro
<
 >
 wrote:
> How can I launch spot instances using "knife ec2 server create"?  I don't
> see any relevant command line switches.
>
> Thanks for the help.