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Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud
User Guide for Linux Instances

Spot Instance Pricing History

The Spot price represents the price above which you have to bid to guarantee that a single Spot request is fulfilled. When your bid price is above the Spot price, Amazon EC2 launches your Spot instance, and when the Spot price rises above your bid price, Amazon EC2 terminates your Spot instance. You can bid above the current Spot price so that your Spot request is fulfilled quickly. However, before you specify a bid price for your Spot instance, we recommend that you review the Spot price history. You can view the Spot price history for the last 90 days, filtering by instance type, operating system, and Availability Zone.

Using the Spot price history as a guide, you can select a bid price that would have met your needs in the past. For example, you can determine which bid price that would have provided 75 percent uptime in the time range you viewed. However, keep in mind that the historical trends are not a guarantee of future results. Spot prices vary based on real-time supply and demand, and the conditions that generated certain patterns in the Spot price might not occur in the future.

To view the Spot price history using the console

  1. Open the Amazon EC2 console at https://console.aws.amazon.com/ec2/.

  2. In the navigation pane, click Spot Requests.

  3. Click Pricing History. By default, the page displays a graph of the data for Linux t1.micro instances in all Availability Zones over the past day. Move your mouse over the graph to display the prices at specific times in the table below the graph.

    The Spot Instance Pricing History tool in the Amazon EC2 console.

  4. (Optional) To review the Spot price history for a specific Availability Zone, select an Availability Zone from the list. You can also select a different product, instance type, or date range.

To view the Spot price history using the command line

You can use one of the following commands. For more information about these command line interfaces, see Accessing Amazon EC2.