AWS Spot Instances in CloudBees Accelerator

For almost 20 years now, our customers have been saving centuries of time with CloudBees Accelerator. However, cost savings for our customers goes way beyond the old ‘Time is Money’ chestnut. Since CloudBees Accelerator is so efficient at infrastructure utilization, customers don’t waste money on excess capacity or idle cloud instances anymore.

Now, with the October preview release of CloudBees Accelerator, our customers can confidently save even more money because it now supports using Amazon EC2 Spot Instances for agent cloud bursting.

Amazon EC2 Spot Instances let you take advantage of unused EC2 capacity in the AWS cloud at significantly discounted prices - up to 90% less than Amazon’s on-demand prices. Amazon doesn’t guarantee spot instances will be available when you want to run a build nor do they guarantee they will be available for the duration of your build. But they do guarantee steep discounts.

Our customers can now take advantage of Spot Instances - safe in the knowledge that CloudBees Accelerator already has enterprise-grade fault tolerance built in.

Using spot instances for your builds is quite easy. You simply check the “Prefer Spot Instances” box while creating a new resource in the Cluster Manager web UI. When you run that build, CloudBees Accelerator will launch it using available spot instances.

If Spot Instances fail to launch, the Cluster Manager attempts to launch regular (on-demand) Amazon EC2 instances of the same type. If a Spot Instance is reclaimed during a build, CloudBees Accelerator will automatically rebalance the workload with regular on-demand instances and ensure the build completes successfully.

Spot Instances aren't the only thing we've added to this month's release. We made improvements to the installer to make it easier for first time users to get started and we updated the Java version in the ClusterManager to OpenJDK 1.8.0_222.

Existing CloudBees Accelerator customers can get the new version by clicking on this link and logging in. If you aren’t using Accelerator and are spending too much time waiting for your AOSP, Visual Studio or C/C++ builds to finish, please download and try it for 30 days. You’ll be glad you did.

• Learn how to buy back time with CloudBees Accelerator

• Check out the executive sessions at DevOps World | Jenkins World Lisbon 2019