Open Market Auction
Rackspace Spot is unique in the industry in its use of open market principles to determine pricing for cloud servers.
Overview
- Spot maintains a list of all current requests for capacity
- Within each region, capacity is allocated starting from the highest bids, until all available capacity is allocated
- The "current market price" is determined by the cut-off price at which the auction ends
- All winning bidders pay the "current market price"
- Losing bidders may include those that had previously been allocated capacity, but now are below the market price. Workloads for such losing bidders will be pre-empted. See Pre-emption Explained
- The auction runs continuously, to ensure bids for capacity are best served from available cloud capacity
Key Factors
Pricing varies by data-center region, as well as by the specific type of Server capacity (Server Class). Pricing is determined by demand and supply. Rackspace does not influence prices in any way, and only sets a minimum bid price; which varies by type of server class. The lowest bid prices in Spot are at $0.001/hr.
Leveraging Price Insights To Determine Your Bid
Use the price insights user interface to understand the price to bid at, and the level of pre-emption you are willing to take on in making the bid.
Price Increments
Since current price is determined by allocating capacity from the highest bidders to the lowest bidders, prices will fluctuate over time.
There may be times when prices remain extremely stable, but other times when prices vary quite significantly within a short time frame.