Spot Limit Increase Walkthrough
The initial steps to configure all possible AWS regions for the necessary spot limit increase can be quite annoying as it is one of the few features of AWS that cannot be automated. To submit your spot limit increase you'll need to perform the following steps.
- Sign into your AWS account
- Click the 'Support Tab' in the top-right of the screen
- Select 'Support Center' in the drop down menu
- Click on 'Create Case' in the AWS Support Center
- Select a case type of 'Service Limit Increase'
- Choose a Limit Type of 'EC2 Spot Instances'
The case you're creating will consist of a series of 'Requests'. Each request specifies a designated _Region _to be affected, an Instance Type to increase limits for and a New Limit Value defining the new maximum number of instances of the specified size that are allowed to run in the chosen region. Please see the Region Notes section at the bottom of this guide for additional details on choosing regions. My observations across ~6 months show that the main regions to request increases in (the typically cheapest regions) are all the US regions (Both US-East and US-West regions).
- Select a region you wish to use
- Choose an instance type (p3.2xlarge, p3.8xlarge, or p3.16xlarge) based off what tier you plan to regularly use. Most people can get away with just using the p3.2xlarge tier. If you need faster cracking you can choose one of the larger classes though they will be more expensive.
- Choose a new limit value (anything more than 0 should be fine, I default to 5)
You've now configured a single request, to increase the limit for a single instance type in a single region. At a minimum I recommend use the 'Add another request' button (8) to add requests covering all four US regions with at least the p3.2xlarge instance type. This means that at a minimum your case will have 4 requests.
- Once you've added all your requests to the case you will need to provide a 'Case desription'. I recommend something along the following lines:
Request spot limit increase to enable distributed computing application relying on spot pricing optimization
- Submit your case request.
Now that the request has been submitted you just have to wait for Amazon to approve the service limit increase.
Cryptbreaker was originally designed to perform its cloud based actions at the cheapest available pricing. To do this it will look across all AWS datacenters to find the best pricing for each type of instance that it can use. This means that instance limit increase requests can potentially need to be submitted for EVERY AWS region. As more people use the tool I realize that the complexity of supporting every region may offset the benefit of saving a 5 cents. Additionally, ~6 months of data have show that the US regions are consistently the cheapest regions to use. As a result, in a future release you will be able to configure which regions you want to use to limit how complex initial setup is. You will still have to submit spot instance increase requests, but you can define in Cryptbreaker exactly what regions you want the tool to use to streamline the request process