Red Hat's Continuous Kernel Integration (CKI) project provides CI-as-a-service for all internal kernel development. AWS spot instances are used to provide the computing power behind it.
Towards the end of 2022, the CKI project faced increasing issues with unstable infrastructure because of its use of spot instances. Requested spot instance types were either not available at all, or instances got terminated forcefully shortly after launch. This prompted an investigation into the underlying issues and ways to fix them.
This talk is going to tell the story of that investigation.
We will also discuss - the limits of the Elastic Cloud of a Hyperscaler - the various API calls to launch AWS spot instances - the best way to do it, and things to be aware of
Attending this talk will leave you with deeper understanding of spot instances. It should also convince you that reworking your code to use the newer API calls is totally worth the effort.