Spotinst, which helps you buy AWS spot instances, raises $2m Series A

Spot instances on AWS can help you save quite a bit of money over paying for a regular virtual machine on EC2. In return, though, these machines may shut down at any time when demand for regular machines increases.

Spotinst helps business manage both the cost and management of these spot instances, with support for Google Cloud Platform’s preemptible machines and Azure, which doesn’t currently offer spot instances, coming soon. The company tells me it is working with the Azure team “to find the right solution” for its customers.

The Tel Aviv-based company today announced that it has raised a $2 million funding round led by PICO Venture Partners.

Spotinst says it uses advanced machine learning to optimize the spot instance bid process for its customers and help them predict when Amazon will switch a given machine off. The service then automatically switches workloads to a new server without any downtime for the customer.

The company says it can help its customers realize cost savings of 50 to 80 percent, but this obviously depends quite heavily on their specific use case (and current use of spot instances).

“Leveraging the benefits of the Spot markets and running cost-aware applications can be a complicated, costly and frustrating process, even for mature companies with experienced DevOps teams and extensive cloud experience,” said Amiram Shachar, CEO of Spotinst. “Spotinst allows any company to outsource the management of the spot instance market, enabling them to focus on the core elements of their business.”

As the Spotinst team tells me, the plan is to use the new funding to “expand operations in the US and invest in R&D efforts to increase the offering on AWS and to start working with Google Cloud and Azure.”