Use DescribeSpotPriceHistory with a CLI

To describe Spot price history

This example command returns the Spot Price history for m1.xlarge instances for a particular day in January.

Command:

aws ec2 describe-spot-price-history --instance-types m1.xlarge --start-time 2014-01-06T07:08:09 --end-time 2014-01-06T08:09:10

Output:

{
  "SpotPriceHistory": [
          {
              "Timestamp": "2014-01-06T07:10:55.000Z",
              "ProductDescription": "SUSE Linux",
              "InstanceType": "m1.xlarge",
              "SpotPrice": "0.087000",
              "AvailabilityZone": "us-west-1b"
          },
          {
              "Timestamp": "2014-01-06T07:10:55.000Z",
              "ProductDescription": "SUSE Linux",
              "InstanceType": "m1.xlarge",
              "SpotPrice": "0.087000",
              "AvailabilityZone": "us-west-1c"
          },
          {
              "Timestamp": "2014-01-06T05:42:36.000Z",
              "ProductDescription": "SUSE Linux (Amazon VPC)",
              "InstanceType": "m1.xlarge",
              "SpotPrice": "0.087000",
              "AvailabilityZone": "us-west-1a"
      },
      ...
}

To describe Spot price history for Linux/UNIX Amazon VPC

This example command returns the Spot Price history for m1.xlarge, Linux/UNIX Amazon VPC instances for a particular day in January.

Command:

aws ec2 describe-spot-price-history --instance-types m1.xlarge --product-description "Linux/UNIX (Amazon VPC)" --start-time 2014-01-06T07:08:09 --end-time 2014-01-06T08:09:10

Output:

{
  "SpotPriceHistory": [
      {
          "Timestamp": "2014-01-06T04:32:53.000Z",
          "ProductDescription": "Linux/UNIX (Amazon VPC)",
          "InstanceType": "m1.xlarge",
          "SpotPrice": "0.080000",
          "AvailabilityZone": "us-west-1a"
      },
      {
          "Timestamp": "2014-01-05T11:28:26.000Z",
          "ProductDescription": "Linux/UNIX (Amazon VPC)",
          "InstanceType": "m1.xlarge",
          "SpotPrice": "0.080000",
          "AvailabilityZone": "us-west-1c"
      }
  ]
}

Example 1: This example gets the last 10 entries in the Spot price history for the specified instance type and Availability Zone. Note that the value specified for the -AvailabilityZone parameter must be valid for the region value supplied to either the cmdlet's -Region parameter (not shown in the example) or set as default in the shell. This example command assumes a default region of 'us-west-2' has been set in the environment.

Get-EC2SpotPriceHistory -InstanceType c3.large -AvailabilityZone us-west-2a -MaxResult 10

Output:

AvailabilityZone   : us-west-2a
InstanceType       : c3.large
Price              : 0.017300
ProductDescription : Linux/UNIX (Amazon VPC)
Timestamp          : 12/25/2015 7:39:49 AM

AvailabilityZone   : us-west-2a
InstanceType       : c3.large
Price              : 0.017200
ProductDescription : Linux/UNIX (Amazon VPC)
Timestamp          : 12/25/2015 7:38:29 AM

AvailabilityZone   : us-west-2a
InstanceType       : c3.large
Price              : 0.017300
ProductDescription : Linux/UNIX (Amazon VPC)
Timestamp          : 12/25/2015 6:57:13 AM
...