From InfoWorld: Amazon has acquired ClusterK, a developer of software that helps companies run mission-critical applications on spare cloud compute capacity sold by Amazon Web Services.
A spokeswoman for AWS confirmed the acquisition, but did not provide further details.
Spot instances are spare Amazon EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) instances for which users name their price. The price for the spot instances can vary in real-time depending on demand and supply. The instance will run until the spot price exceeds the bid or the user terminates it.
This is in contrast with AWS On-Demand instances that let users pay for compute capacity by the hour without long-term commitments, or Reserved instances, which provide capacity reservation. AWS has positioned spot instances as the option to use when customers have flexibility in when their applications can run.
ClusterK in Palo Alto, California, however, promised customers high availability even when using the lower-cost spot instances. "Any single Spot Market can be highly volatile and, in isolation, not appropriate for mission critical applications," it wrote on its website. ClusterK automates the use of multiple instance types, across multiple availability zones to create a highly available platform ideal for mission-critical applications, it added.
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