If that works out to same prices as keeping compute at literally your peak requirement level round the clock then something is very wrong somewhere. Maybe that issue is not in-house at blacksmith - perhaps spot pricing is a joke...but something there doesn't check out.
Loads of companies do scaling with much less predictable patterns.
>risk of slowdowns
Yeah you do probably want the scaling to be super conservative...but -80% fluctuation is a comically large gap to not actively scale
>To illustrate
Better view I'd say is: That chart looks like ~4.5 peak. So you're paying for 730 hours of peak capacity and using all of it about 90 hrs.
Given that they wrote a blog about this topic they probably have a good reason for doing it this way. Just doesn't really make sense to me based on given info
m7i.4xlarge on AWS spot price right now is $0.39/hour whereas renting the server is about half that per hour.
>whereas renting the server is about half that per hour.
If you're at capacity only 90 out of 730 a month then paying 2x for spot to cover those peaks is a slam dunk
To illustrate a 128GB ram 20 core server with a 10Gbps NIC and some small SSD storage is probably going to cost you <$2000 USD for a years rental.