LaurieWired(@lauriewired):There’s actually a much nastier strategy with cloud bidding btw. Say you really want a machine, but there is no current capacity: 1. Create a VPC with only a few IP addresses 2. Submit 1,000 spot bids at 10x the normal price 3. Price engine starts terminating low bidder’s spot instances 4. Engine attempts to launch 1,000 instances…but from IP restriction, only say ~5 are successful 5. Now, suddenly with massive oversupply, spot instance price temporarily crashes 6. Win? It’s kind of a cloud-auction DoS attack. Supposedly one of the main reasons EC2 overhauled the pricing system!

2026.08.19 01:19

There’s actually a much nastier strategy with cloud bidding btw. Say you really want a machine, but there is no current capacity: 1. Create a VPC with only a few IP addresses 2. Submit 1,000 spot bids at 10x the normal price 3. Price engine starts terminating low bidder’s spot instances 4. Engine attempts to launch 1,000 instances…but from IP restriction, only say ~5 are successful 5. Now, suddenly with massive oversupply, spot instance price temporarily crashes 6. Win? It’s kind of a cloud-auction DoS attack. Supposedly one of the main reasons EC2 overhauled the pricing system!

LaurieWired@lauriewired

2026.08.18 18:17

There’s a funny reason why no one auctions compute instances at large scales anymore. EC2 Spot Instances, until about ~2017 were a “true” uniform price auction. Many quickly gamed the system. The lowest accepted bid was the clearing price. By bidding ridiculously high (999.99$ an hour), you could basically guarantee that your spot instance never gets kicked…but *most* of the time you’ll still be paying a reasonable price. Well…until the unthinkable happened. On September 26, 2011, m2.2xlarge in us-east suddenly became capacity constrained. Enough people were using the “haha, 999 bid” strategy that the clearing price of the spot instance rose from $0.44 an hour to $999.99 an hour for a two-hour period! AFAIK, no major cloud provider currently uses an auction market for spot instances…exactly to avoid this kind of thing (among other funny bidding games).