Presentation: 250GB of RAM for 34¢/hour: EC2 spot instances

Saturday 12:40 p.m.–12:47 p.m. in Colony Ballroom

250GB of RAM for 34¢/hour: EC2 spot instances

Kamal Marhubi

Audience level:: Intermediate

Description

Ever needed 250GB of RAM, but just for a few minutes or hours? With Amazon's EC2 spot instances, you can get a machine with 250GB of RAM for as little as 34¢/hour! I'll give a recipe for getting set up with Python + your packages in 10 minutes, and get a remote IPython Notebook to work with.

Abstract

When working with medium or large datasets, say with Pandas and Numpy, you sometimes need more RAM than your local machine is likely to have. With Amazon's EC2 spot instances, you can get instances for up to ten times cheaper than the on-demand pricing. This brings a machine with 68 GB of RAM to as little as 14¢ an hour, and one with 244 GB of RAM to 34¢ an hour.

In this lightning talk, I'll show you how to easily get a spot instance running with all the packages you need. I'll also show you how to connect to it remotely with IPython Notebook, giving you a rich web-based interface to your massive machine.