Amazon has announced that accounts created after December, 2013 have an undetermined limit on the number of spot instances that can be created.

“By default, you are limited to a total of 5 Spot Instance requests in a region. New AWS accounts might have lower limits.”

This has created a lot of confusion with RedLine customers since new Amazon accounts seem to be set to a default mostly of 0.  And existing customers that used to spin up dozens of spot instances are no longer allowed to. And there appears to not be a consistent pattern to the quantity and region limits. You can see other customer confusion here, here, here and here to name a few.

We have been in lively debate with Amazon support and trying to get the attention of the spot instance product manager. It appears there is not going to be a change in this policy. We have requested things like an API to enable us to see how many spot instances and in what regions an account can be created.

RedLine will be making a switch to use On Demand instances as a default. You will still be able to use spot instances if your account is enabled up to the limit that Amazon sets for your account.

You can create a request for an increase in spot instances by going creating a support request like the one below. You will have to make a separate request for each instance type and for each region. Please let your Amazon account rep and support rep know this is a problem that should be addressed.