If you'd like to learn about an open-source scheduler that does mimic some of the properties of an internal spot market, check out Cook: https://github.com/twosigma/Cook

It's unlikely that Netflix implemented anything this complex for video encoding, since Cook is only valuable when you're scheduling jobs from parties with conflicting incentives, rather than a singular purpose like "encode all Netflix video".

Looking closer at the mission to "encode all Netflix video", a less idealized version involves people at Netflix and outside it, who have signed contracts with deadlines and monetary incentives and everyone wants to go first, but how many are willing to put their money where their mouth is, so to speak.

It's expensive to operate thousands of instances in AWS, so I presume there's also a relentless push internally to drive down costs.

Thanks for the link to Cook, that's fascinating. The fact that it plugs into Mesos seems quite useful!

Holy Shit, two sigma, the hedge fund, developed that.(Cook)

>Cook is a powerful batch scheduler, specifically designed to provide a great user experience when there are more jobs to run than your cluster has capacity for.

I designed the audio transcoding infrastructure and scaling plan for an audio-heavy startup a number of years ago, but unfortunately the mobile app was delayed and they ran out of money before public launch.

Using other servers as lower priority job servers is a great way to increase utilization during off-peak times and save on server costs. You have to think about what happens if either a batch job or the server's main task runs away with all the system resources, so it can get tricky. A spot market might actually be an interesting solution to some of those problems, though for most of us, just using disk quotas and nice levels will be enough.