Do you have a soft spot for cheap cloud computing (a.k.a. AWS Spot instances)? Me too, no shame on that.

However, what is a shame is having to go through that clunky UI and click here and there to get one; soft-spot makes it dead easy to launch an instance:

Just define a file with the specifications of the machine you want to launch:

[INSTANCE]
ami = ami-06d51e91cea0dac8d
type = t2.micro
security_group = SecurityGroupName
key_pair = some-key
spot_price = 0.005
availability_zone = us-west-2c

[VOLUME]
id = vol-00a56acb10f11b0e3
device = /dev/sdf

[ACCOUNT]
user = ubuntu
key_location = ~/.ssh/some-key.pem

[SCRIPT]
commands = ["sudo mkdir /data", "sudo mount /dev/xvdf /data", "sudo chown ubuntu /data"]

Then just execute the sspot request command:

sspot request <<instance_config_file>>

Cancel all active spot requests and terminate the instances associated to them:

sspot cancel

Show the prices for the specified spot instance:

sspot price <<instance_config_file>>

This script uses boto3 so I strongly recommend heading over to its documentation to learn more.

Alternatively, you could create a tiny configuration file like this:

[DEFAULT]
aws_access_key_id = an_acces_key
aws_secret_access_key = a_secret_key
region_name = us-west-2

And then pass it on to the spot command:

sspot -a ~/aws_credentials.txt request <<instance_config_file>>