Saving Money and Reducing risk with Immutable EC2 Spot Instances

Have you ever deployed an application only to have it fail? Have you then discovered that the issues were caused by a manual configuration change on the server?

What if every time you built your application, you provisioned a new server image from the ground up as a first-class citizen of your build process? Fully automated, fully version controlled, tested and immutable. Deploying your application becomes a straightforward process of launching a new server image and retiring the old server.

The immutable server pattern is a practical alternative to containerising applications. In this talk, we’ll look at the benefits of using immutable servers as part of an immutable infrastructure paradigm and look at a practical example of packaging a Rails application into an immutable server.

We’ll take this a step further and look at how an Immutable Server is an ideal candidate for running as an EC2 Spot Instance on AWS, saving you up to 90% of the on-demand costs.

About the speaker
James Ridgway is an experienced Software Engineer and a leader of engineering teams.

He has worked across numerous technology stacks from Android development and web development through to building a distributed platform of microservices. His approach to engineering is quality focused, with an emphasis on consistency, best practice and technical excellence.

James currently works as CTO and Founder for The Curve - a software development and technology leadership consultancy based in Sheffield.