This could be useful for us as well. It is a problem to hardcode to a single availability zone / vpc subnet for spot instances as there could be price spikes and capacity bottlenecks.
Tried comma separated subnet IDs for VPC. It did not work

But when adding multiple AMIs in different subnets (-> AZs) this should work, right?

Ideally the availability zone isnt entered at all when using spot instances, and instead you would select which region you would like your nodes in. Then the ec2 plugin could poll each region's zones for the current spot prices and choose the least expensive option.  Is there a use case for restricting your nodes to a single az, or is that just an artifact of the api call to start an instance?

EC2Cloud receives a template parameter which pulls from the configured AMI's. It's possible to change

hudson.plugins.ec2.EC2Cloud#getTemplate(java.lang.String)

to check which template has the lowest spot price and return that. That approach feels pretty hacky.

What determines which template description is supplied to  

public HttpResponse doProvision(@QueryParameter String template)

?

Subnet ID for VPC only takes a string and 1 subnet id?

I tried leaving availability zone empty but use the subnet id method instead and was only allowed to have 1.

Any progress or workarounds here? This hurts when using instances that have lower availability (i.e. graphics instances)

I'm working on a patch. The goal is to allow the subnet ID text box to take a list of subnet IDs. When a new instance is launched, a round-robin AZ will be chosen from that list. Hopefully this will spread the load out a bit. It would be kind of cool to watch out for ICE errors and then do some kind of backoff for that region, but that seems unnecessary for now.

Hi francisu, any chance to review davidfluck's PR (#295) soon?

Hi davidfluck, we have a good chance to see your PR #295 reviewed soon since new maintainers work actively on this plugin! \o/

Did you see jvz 's comment on your PR?

mgaunin Sorry for the wait! I did, yeah. I should be able to rebase that shortly. Thank you!

Hi francisu, I guess the status does not reflect the reality. If I'm not wrong, the fix has been delivered into the 1.41 release.

Hi,

Is this feature now live?  Are there any instructions on how to use it?  I've tried providing a comma-separated list of subnets in different AZs but receive error
"com.amazonaws.AmazonClientException: Security groups must all be VPC security groups to work in a VPC context". I can only launch slaves if I specify one subnet and the related AZ.

It looks like this change has indeed been released. I've also encountered that error before. How are you listing the subnets? Are you using subnet IDs? Are all of the subnets in the same VPC?

This is the relevant code:

private List<String> getEc2SecurityGroups(AmazonEC2 ec2) throws AmazonClientException {
    List<String> groupIds = new ArrayList<String>();

    DescribeSecurityGroupsResult groupResult = getSecurityGroupsBy("group-name", securityGroupSet, ec2);
    if (groupResult.getSecurityGroups().size() == 0) {
        groupResult = getSecurityGroupsBy("group-id", securityGroupSet, ec2);
    }

    for (SecurityGroup group : groupResult.getSecurityGroups()) {
        if (group.getVpcId() != null && !group.getVpcId().isEmpty()) {
            List<Filter> filters = new ArrayList<Filter>();
            filters.add(new Filter("vpc-id").withValues(group.getVpcId()));
            filters.add(new Filter("state").withValues("available"));
            filters.add(new Filter("subnet-id").withValues(getCurrentSubnetId()));

            DescribeSubnetsRequest subnetReq = new DescribeSubnetsRequest();
            subnetReq.withFilters(filters);
            DescribeSubnetsResult subnetResult = ec2.describeSubnets(subnetReq);

            List<Subnet> subnets = subnetResult.getSubnets();
            if (subnets != null && !subnets.isEmpty()) {
                groupIds.add(group.getGroupId());
            }
        }
    }

    if (securityGroupSet.size() != groupIds.size()) {
        throw new AmazonClientException("Security groups must all be VPC security groups to work in a VPC context");
    }

    return groupIds;
}

Hi David,

Thanks for replying so quickly. I'm supplying the subnet ids as a comma-separated list (subnet-<string1>, subnet-<string2>, subnet-<string3>). All of the subnets are part of the same VPC but belong to different AZs.

subnet-<string1> is part of AZ us-east-1a
subnet-<string2> is part of AZ us-east-1b
subnet-<string3> is part of AZ us-east-1c

I am also listing the three AZs as a comma-separated list in the "availability zone" text box ie. us-east-1a, us-east-1b, us-east-1c

It is possible that I have misunderstood the new feature. Do the subnets have to be part of the same availability zone?

Hi Nicola, I could be wrong but a colleague of mine mentioned that you need to provide the AZ list as space delimited (not comma delimited).

Ed

Hi Ed,

Thanks for the suggestion. I've just tried it out but unfortunately still get the same error (various combos tried). I haven't had a chance to read through the source code, but it looks like az can only take one availability zone, not a list, and so all subnets must be part of the same az.

Nicky