As organizations look for innovative ways to optimize ASG costs without compromising on reliability and uptime, Spot instances offer the potential to cut costs by up to 90%. 

Yet, many teams are still hesitant to use Spot. Challenges such as selecting optimal instance families, types and sizes, navigating Spot interruptions, and knowing how much to use with your existing Reserved Instances and Savings Plans all make it difficult to save with Spot.

At nOps, we manage $2 billion in AWS spend and have a deep understanding of how to reliably run Spot at scale. That’s why we built Compute Copilot for ASG, an intelligent workload provisioner that automatically provisions and manages instances. Copilot ensures that your ASGs are continually optimized, harnessing the ideal blend of RI, SP and Spot to deliver optimal cost and performance. 

In this article, discover how nOps can help engineering teams automatically optimize ASGs and leverage the power of Spot without downtime — freeing them to focus on building and innovating.

Native integration with AWS ASG

Compute Copilot integrates natively with AWS Auto Scaling Groups (ASGs) via a small Lambda. This makes it easy to add to your existing ASGs and doesn’t require adopting a new auto scaling framework. It’s fast and easy to onboard and start saving — deploy a cloud formation stack and just add tags or configure from our dashboard to connect or disconnect your ASGs. 

Detailed Dashboard offers full transparency into ASGs

Via existing tools, it’s difficult to understand the granular performance and cost metrics of your ASGs. Copilot’s intuitive dashboard makes it easy to view the distribution of your ASGs based on AZ, purchase option, price per core and GB of memory for your pre-Copilot and post-Copilot Spot performance. Also, quickly view the activity of your ASG with all existing instances of a specific ASG, Spot replacements by Copilot, duration, and cost savings.

Intelligent and automated instance selection

Not sure what instance families or sizes will suit the specific requirements of your workloads? With Copilot, engineers no longer have to sift through the vast sea of AWS instance types to choose workload-suitable instances. Just specify your workload requirements once, and we will automatically narrow down the right instance types so you never have to worry about compatibility. 

Real-time instance reconsideration with RI and Savings Plan Awareness

Why do engineers still need to manually manage workloads? Copilot continually monitors your scaling events, commitments and the Spot market to ensure you are always on the instances best suited for your workloads, even as your dynamic usage changes.

Automated Provisioning with RI, Savings Plan, and Spot Awareness

Ensuring you use all of your AWS purchase commitments can be a challenge, particularly as they apply hourly on a use-it-lose-it basis. It’s complex and difficult to manually determine the perfect blend of RI, SP and Spot to use for optimal price and stability. Copilot reconsiders your workload allocation in real-time, so you always get perfect balance and commitment utilization.

Automated Commitment Management

Automate the optimal allocation of your Savings Plans and Reserved Instances for greater savings AND flexibility. Copilot manages commitments on your behalf so you don’t have to manually review and adjust purchase decisions — plus, a buy-back guarantee eliminates your risk of over-committing. 

Native Support for Spot Termination

Copilot empowers you to run many more workloads safely on Spot, for greater savings. We analyze massive amounts of proprietary Spot market and historical data with Machine Learning to predict how long Spot instances will live. With 60-minutes advance termination warning, Copilot continually and proactively moves your workloads onto diverse instance types, gracefully draining nodes so that Spot interruptions don’t have any effect on yoru workload. 

Intelligent Spot Management that Maximizes Stability and Scalability

nOps automatically generate the widest possible list of instance families suited to your workload, such that there are always cheap and reliable instances available to move you into — making it orders of magnitude easier and more reliable to use Spot. In fact, nOps offers the same SLAs as AWS On-Demand.

Advanced Allocation Controls

Get fine-grained control over how Spot is used within your ASGs. You can easily define the percentage or number of Spot instances you want to run, or even set a base capacity of On-Demand instances and allow Spot to scale on top. With “minimum number of On-Demand instances” safeguards, you maintain guaranteed baseline capacity and stability — while still capturing the cost benefits of Spot for all incremental scaling.  

Copilot also supports all four Spot allocation strategies — capacity optimized, capacity optimized prioritized, lowest price, and price capacity optimized — giving you the flexibility to balance cost and reliability exactly how you need.

Seamless Integration and Developer-Friendly Setup

Compute Copilot integrates seamlessly with ECS and AWS Batch, even when ASGs are used as capacity providers. Using AWS Instance Refresh, it ensures zero downtime as it gradually transitions workloads to Spot — keeping your infrastructure continuously available.

Copilot is also developer-friendly: configure it simply through tags in your preferred IaC tool (Terraform, Pulumi, CloudFormation, etc.). Just add a few tags and you’re ready to go. Before configuring via tags, make sure you’ve onboarded to the nOps platform and deployed the CloudFormation Lambda in the AWS account where your ASGs exist.

Do ASGs better with nOps

When it comes to getting the best cost and performance out of your Auto Scaling Groups, automation is key. Because your usage, Spot pricing and Spot availability are constantly changing, Copilot takes a proactive approach — continually adjusting your workloads to put you on the right instance types and sizes, maximize the use of your commitments, and confidently navigate Spot interruptions to benefit from savings.

Book a demo to see how Compute Copilot can help with your ASGs.

Demo

AI-Powered Cost Management Platform

Discover how much you can save in just 10 minutes!

Book a Demo