Rancher and Spotinst partner to introduce a new model for utilizing Docker orchestration tools on spot instances


spotinstlogo](https://cdn.rancher.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/16025649/spotinstlogo.png) We are very excited to announce a new partnership with Spotinst today to deliver intelligent management and migration of container workloads running on spot instances. With this new solution, we have developed a simple, intuitive way for using spot instances to run any container workload reliably and for a fraction of the cost of traditional applications. Since the dawn of data centers we’ve seen continuous improvements in utilization and cost efficiency. But like [Jevons’ Paradox]](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox), the more efficient we become in consuming a resource, the more of that resource we consume. So we always are seeking the newest, fastest and uber-optimized of everything.

How it works:

Spotinst is a SaaS platform that enables reliable, highly available use of AWS Spot Instances and Google Preemptible VMs with typical savings of 70-90%.

We’ve worked with the team at Spotinst to integrate with the Rancher API directly. The integration utlizes Docker “checkpoint and resume” (CRIU project). Based on metrics and business rules provided by Spotinst, Rancher can freeze any container and resume it on any other instance, automating the process a typical DevOps team might implement to manage container deployment. rancher-spotinst-1](https://cdn.rancher.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/16030224/rancher-spotinst-1.png) For example, if Spotinst identifies that the spot instance a container is running on, is about to terminate (with a 4 - 7 minute heads-up), Spotinst will instruct Rancher to pause that container and relocate it to another relevant instance. rancher-spotinst-2](https://cdn.rancher.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/16030220/rancher-spotinst-2.png)

Unprecedented Availability for Online Gaming While pizza servers, blade racks and eventually virtualization technology paved the way for modern data centers, today’s cloud computing customer expects increasingly higher performance and higher availability in everything from online gaming to genome sequencing. An awesome example of how Docker is utilizing live migration to deliver high availability can be seen in this presentation from DockerCon earlier this yeaar.

The presenters show how they containerized Quake, had it running on a DigitalOcean server in Singapore, and then live migrated it to Amsterdam with the player experiencing practically zero interruption to his game. Using “checkpoint and resume”, they didn’t just stop the container, but took an entire running process with all its memory, file descriptors, etc. and effortlessly moved it and resumed it halfway around the world.

How it works?

rancher-spotinst-4](https://cdn.rancher.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/16030205/rancher-spotinst-4.png)

We’re really excited about the potential of live migrating containers, and this partnership with Spotinst. By moving workloads to spot instances, organizations can dramatically reduce the cost of cloud resources.

To try out the new service, you can sign up for a Spotinst account and directly connect it to your running Rancher deployment, via your API keys.

To learn more, please request a demonstration from one of our engineers.

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