Did you guys look at bare metal at all? (either dedicated or colocated)? Spot gets you in the same ballpark of price on a "unit", which can be mentally deceiving since an AWS unit is pretty weak.
In our experience with CPU or IO intensive workloads, Spots are still 2-5x slower than what you can get at decent dedicated provider..
No, there was no time nor did we have the in-team experience. EC2 is one thing, which you can get down to pretty cheap if leveraging spot instances, but most of our infrastructure costs was on storage.
In our experience with CPU or IO intensive workloads, Spots are still 2-5x slower than what you can get at decent dedicated provider..