How to bid for a spot instance with price: 0.0164

Question

I looked at the charts of last week's EC2 prices for m1.large in us-east-1c, and I saw prices like: 0.0160, 0.0161, 0.0162, 0.0163 so clearly there must be a way to bid for prices like this, but when I try to create a cluster using the amazon elastic-mapreduce ruby cli, then I get this error:

Error: No more than 3 digits are allowed after decimal place in bid price

There must be a way to do this other than bidding for 0.017

Answer 1

The bid price you provide is the maximum price you are willing to pay for that instance. As such, the vast majority of time you are actually paying less than that price you specify. Perhaps that's why there is no need for more than three digits; the bidding perhaps isn't lost or won by such a small margin as below the third decimal, etc.