News

Amazon Grabs Spot Instances Specialist ClusterK

• By David Ramel
• 05/01/2015

Amazon isn't providing details, but the company confirmed it has acquired ClusterK Inc., which specializes in helping enterprises save money by bidding on unused compute instances, called Spot Instances.

"Spot Instances allow you to name your own price for Amazon EC2 computing capacity," the Amazon Web Services Inc. (AWS) site states. "You simply bid on spare Amazon EC2 instances and run them whenever your bid exceeds the current Spot Price, which varies in real-time based on supply and demand. The Spot Instance pricing model complements the On-Demand and Reserved Instance pricing models, often providing the most cost-effective computing capacity, depending on your application."

ClusterK helps companies save money by managing the bidding process to find the best deals.

Or, in its own words, "ClusterK offers software that enables high availability in the AWS Spot Market, to accelerate and save up to 90 percent for mission-critical applications. By seamlessly integrating price prediction, multiple markets and offensively rebalancing your application, ClusterK optimizes your infrastructure for performance, availability and the lowest cost."

One missing detail is the price -- an analyst told Venture Beat only that Amazon is paying between $20 million and $50 million for the startup founded in 2013 in Palo Alto, Calif.

Enterprises interested in checking out ClusterK's services can play with an interactive chart that details current spot prices around the globe.

"Any single Spot Market can be highly volatile and, in isolation, not appropriate for mission critical applications," the site states. "However, ClusterK automates the use of multiple instance types, across multiple availability zones to create a highly available platform ideal for mission-critical applications."