HOWTO: Launch AWS Marketplace AMIs as Spot instances

Thu, Jan 7, 2016

HOWTO: Launch AWS Marketplace AMIs as Spot instances

This post assumes you know about AWS Spot instances and the AWS Marketplace - in short, Spot instances allow you to bid on spare AWS EC2 instance capacity for (usually) a much lower price, and the Marketplace allows you to create instances based on software images supplied by third parties. For example a network software vendor may supply their firewall software as a Marketplace image (known as an AMI - an Amazon Machine Image) and from that AMI you can create a Spot EC2 instance (a server) for a greatly reduced cost compared to the normal EC2 prices.

A colleague planned to spin up an instance based on a Marketplace AMI for testing and asked me if I had any advice. ‘Launch it as spot?’ I suggested and he tried but reported back that he couldn’t as the Spot option was not selectable in the AWS console. My first thought was ‘oh he must be choosing an instance type that doesn’t support Spot’ - not all instance types support being run as Spot - but he was using a c3.xlarge which is on the list of supported instance types. I tried it myself with a different Marketplace AMI and sure enough the Spot check box was inactive.

After some research I found there is a way to launch these AMIs as Spot instances but it is not so obvious so I have detailed it here.

1. Sign into your AWS console and navigate to the EC2 section.
2. Select the link to the Marketplace on the bottom right hand side.

3. Find the Marketplace AMI which you want to use. For this example I am using the AMI “Cisco Cloud Services Router (CSR) 1000V - Bring Your Own License (BYOL)”. Some AMIs include a fee for running the software on top of the fee for running the EC2 instance, others are Bring Your Own License (BYOL) meaning you have to own or purchase a license separately. Select your region, review the costs and click Continue.

4. You have to ‘subscribe’ to access the AMI. This means accepting the terms and conditions for running the vendor software (and means that AWS can notify you if there is an issue with the AMI software, such as a security update). You can see that the ‘Launch with EC2 console’ links are inactive meaning you must accept the terms to continue. Click the ‘Accept Terms’ button.

5. You will be told to refresh the page. Do that. The ‘Launch with EC2 console’ links will now be active. Click the link next to the region in which you want to launch the instance - I chose the Sydney region.

6. You can now continue with the normal EC2 launch wizard and this time the ‘Request Spot instances’ check box is available.

And that’s it. CLI users, you have to subscribe to the AMI in the console - there does not appear to be a way to subscribe from the CLI. Once you have subscribed you can launch via the CLI as normal.