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Finding the Right Instance ​

This tutorial walks through the complete workflow for discovering and evaluating EC2 instance types before launching — using truffle find, truffle search, truffle spot, and truffle quotas in sequence.

The workflow ​

truffle find    →  discover the instance family
truffle search  →  browse sizes and filter by specs
truffle spot    →  check current Spot prices
truffle quotas  →  verify you have headroom
spawn launch    →  launch with confidence

Each step is a separate sub-command. Flags like --min-vcpu only exist on truffle search, not on truffle find.

Example: AMD EPYC Genoa instances ​

Step 1 — Discover the family with truffle find ​

Use plain language to discover which instance families match a processor or capability:

sh
truffle find "epyc genoa"

Output (abbreviated):

Found 40 instance types across 11 region(s)

┌────────────────┬────────────────┬───────┬──────────────┬──────────────┐
│ Instance Type  │ Region         │ vCPUs │ Memory (GiB) │ Architecture │
├────────────────┼────────────────┼───────┼──────────────┼──────────────┤
│ hpc7a.48xlarge │ us-east-2      │ 96    │ 768.0        │ x86_64       │
│ m7a.medium     │ eu-central-1   │ 1     │ 4.0          │ x86_64       │
│ m7a.large      │ eu-central-1   │ 2     │ 8.0          │ x86_64       │
│ m8a.4xlarge    │ us-east-1      │ 16    │ 64.0         │ x86_64       │
│ c7a.xlarge     │ us-east-1      │ 4     │ 8.0          │ x86_64       │
...

You can see the EPYC Genoa families: m7a, m8a, c7a, r7a, hpc7a. To include spec requirements in the query, put them in the string:

sh
truffle find "epyc genoa 16 cores"
truffle find "epyc genoa 64gb"

find vs search flags

truffle find does not accept --min-vcpu or --min-memory. Include specs in the query string instead. Use truffle search when you want to filter by exact numeric thresholds.

Once you know the family, use truffle search to browse all sizes with numeric filters:

sh
truffle search "m8a.*" --min-vcpu 16 --min-memory 64 --skip-azs

Output:

Found 5 instance types across 3 region(s)

┌───────────────┬───────────┬───────┬──────────────┬──────────────┐
│ Instance Type │ Region    │ vCPUs │ Memory (GiB) │ Architecture │
├───────────────┼───────────┼───────┼──────────────┼──────────────┤
│ m8a.4xlarge   │ us-east-1 │ 16    │ 64.0         │ x86_64       │
│ m8a.8xlarge   │ us-east-1 │ 32    │ 128.0        │ x86_64       │
│ m8a.16xlarge  │ us-east-1 │ 64    │ 256.0        │ x86_64       │
...

Common truffle search flags:

  • --min-vcpu N — minimum vCPU count
  • --min-memory N — minimum memory in GiB
  • --architecture arm64|x86_64 — filter by CPU architecture
  • --show-price — include on-demand pricing
  • --pick-first — output only the top result (for scripting)

Step 3 — Check Spot prices with truffle spot ​

Before committing, check current Spot prices. Spot can be 60–90% cheaper than on-demand:

sh
truffle spot m8a.4xlarge --sort-by-price --active-only --show-savings

Output (--show-savings adds the On-Demand and Savings columns, using live AWS Price List rates):

┌───────────────┬───────────┬───────────────────┬───────────────┬───────────┬─────────┐
│ Instance Type │ Region    │ Availability Zone │ Spot Price/hr │ On-Demand │ Savings │
├───────────────┼───────────┼───────────────────┼───────────────┼───────────┼─────────┤
│ m8a.4xlarge   │ us-east-1 │ us-east-1a        │ $0.0812       │ $0.7750   │ 89%     │
│               │ us-east-1 │ us-east-1c        │ $0.0834       │ $0.7750   │ 89%     │
│               │ us-west-2 │ us-west-2b        │ $0.0901       │ $0.7750   │ 88%     │

To compare across regions, add --regions:

sh
truffle spot m8a.4xlarge --regions us-east-1,us-east-2,eu-west-1 --sort-by-price

Step 4 — Check your quota with truffle quotas ​

Every AWS account has vCPU quotas per instance family. m8a is in the Standard family (same quota as M, C, R, T instances):

sh
truffle quotas --family Standard --regions us-east-1

Output:

┌──────────┬───────────┬────────────┬───────────┬────────────┬────────┐
│ Family   │ Type      │ Quota      │ In Use    │ Available  │ Status │
├──────────┼───────────┼────────────┼───────────┼────────────┼────────┤
│ Standard │ On-Demand │ 1480 vCPUs │ 153 vCPUs │ 1327 vCPUs │ ✅ OK  │
│ Standard │ Spot      │ 640 vCPUs  │ -         │ 640 vCPUs  │ ✅ OK  │

An m8a.4xlarge has 16 vCPUs. With 1327 available, you can run up to ~82 simultaneous on-demand instances before hitting quota.

If you're near the limit, generate a quota increase request:

sh
truffle quotas --family Standard --regions us-east-1 --request

Step 5 — Launch ​

sh
spawn launch my-job \
  --instance-type m8a.4xlarge \
  --region us-east-1 \
  --spot \
  --ttl 4h

Or use --pick-first to pipe directly from truffle search:

sh
spawn launch my-job \
  --instance-type $(truffle search "m8a.*" --min-vcpu 16 --pick-first) \
  --spot \
  --ttl 4h

GPU example: NVIDIA H100 ​

The same workflow applies for specialized instances:

sh
# 1. Find H100 instances
truffle find "h100 efa"

# 2. Browse p5 sizes (H100 is in p5 family)
truffle search "p5.*" --skip-azs

# 3. Check Spot prices (p5 is rarely Spot — check on-demand)
truffle spot p5.48xlarge --regions us-east-1,us-west-2

# 4. Check P-family quota (separate from Standard)
truffle quotas --family P --regions us-east-1

# 5. Launch (p5 typically on-demand, not Spot)
spawn launch gpu-job --instance-type p5.48xlarge --ttl 24h

Quick reference: which command for what ​

TaskCommand
"What instances have H100 GPUs?"truffle find "h100"
"What are all c7a sizes?"truffle search "c7a.*"
"c7a instances with ≥32 vCPUs"truffle search "c7a.*" --min-vcpu 32
"Current Spot price for g5.xlarge"truffle spot g5.xlarge
"Do I have quota for more G instances?"truffle quotas --family G
"Check capacity reservations"truffle capacity --gpu-only

See also ​