At the first Open Source in Finance Forum (OSFF) Toronto, the FINOS community announced a major expansion of its High-Performance Computing (HPC) portfolio. Today, we are thrilled to spotlight 5-Spot, a cloud-native Kubernetes controller recently contributed by RBC Capital Markets.
Solving the Idle Infrastructure Challenge
Financial institutions operate some of the world's largest compute estates, however, these environments face a staggering utilization gap: while servers may reach 70% utilization during market hours, that number often plummets to just 10% overnight.
Historically, this "stranded capacity" has been a significant drain on Capital Expenditure (CAPEX) and energy, with firms paying for power and cooling on hardware that sits idle for eight hours a night. 5-Spot addresses this by reclaiming that "night shift" compute and returning it to the cluster for productive use.
What is 5-Spot?
5-Spot is a cloud-native Kubernetes controller designed to bring the economics of cloud "spot" or preemptible instances to on-premises physical infrastructure. It allows platform teams to reclaim idle hardware by adding and removing machines from clusters on a strictly defined schedule.
Built as a Kubernetes operator, it leverages Cluster API (CAPI) to standardize how machines are provisioned and joined to clusters. By using a single `ScheduledMachine` Custom Resource Definition (CRD), hardware owners can specify exactly when their nodes should join the cluster, down to the day of the week, hour, and timezone.
Key Features
- Deterministic Lifecycle Management: The controller handles the entire lifecycle through well-defined phases: Pending → Scheduled → Active → Removing → Inactive.
- Graceful Draining: To protect critical workloads, 5-Spot automates node draining and sends graceful shutdown signals before a machine is removed at the end of its scheduled window.
- Safety & Kill Switches: Hardware owners retain ultimate control through an immediate "kill switch," allowing them to reclaim their hardware instantly for urgent market events.
- Confidential Computing: 5-Spot integrates with Kata Containers and Confidential Containers (CoCo), using TPM-enabled hardware to ensure guest workloads are completely isolated and encrypted from the host server.
Use Cases
- Cost Optimization: Run compute-intensive batch jobs (like VaR or CVA simulations) on idle on-prem hardware before bursting out to more expensive cloud resources.
- Sustainability: Drastically improve energy efficiency by maximizing the utilization of already-powered-on hardware.
- Ephemeral Environments: Automatically provision and tear down staging or testing clusters on a recurring schedule.
Fun Fact
As the creators brainstormed ideas for a project name, the phrase “spot me five bucks” came up and the name stuck. It’s a fitting way to describe borrowing capacity, even if the returns can be anything but small.
Get Involved!
- Explore the Code: The v0.1.0 release is available now at github.com/finos/5-spot
- Get Started: Explore the documentation at 5spot.finos.org.
- Connect with the Team: Join the #5-spot channel on the FINOS Slack or reach out to the project maintainers and community at 5-spot@lists.finos.org.
- Contribute: Check out our open issues and contributing guide.
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