Preparing a production cluster
In this section, we will discuss how to prepare a production Docker Swarm cluster to run FaaS platforms at the cheapest rate possible on AWS Spot instances. The cost of deploying a Docker cluster would be as cheap as running codes on AWS Lambda, but it allows us to control almost everything in our cluster. If the deployment policy is cost-driven, this is the best way to go.
Cost savings with Spot instances
When we are talking about the cloud, its on-demand instances are actually cheap already. However, in the long run, the price of using cloud instances will be similar to buying real machines. To solve this pricing problem, major cloud providers, such as Amazon EC2, and Google Cloud Platform, provide a new instance type, collectively called a Spot instance in this book:
Figure 7.7: Comparison of shutdown signals of a Spot instance on AWS versus Google Cloud
Spot instances are far cheaper than on-demand instances. However, their weak point is the short life cycle...