New Project: 5 Spot

[Erick Bourgeois]

Dear FINOS Community,

 

I am excited to announce that 5-Spot was successfully contributed to FINOS and hosted at https://github.com/finos/5-spot. The project has entered the FINOS Incubating stage and is licensed under Apache-2.0.

 

5-Spot is a cloud-native Kubernetes controller for time-based machine scheduling on physical nodes using Cluster API (CAPI). It lets platform teams add and remove machines from CAPI clusters on a schedule, bringing cloud-style spot/preemptible economics to on-premises infrastructure while handling the messy parts (graceful shutdown, node draining, leader election, kill switches) automatically. A single `ScheduledMachine` CRD describes when a node should join the cluster (day-of-week, hour-of-day, timezone), and the controller handles the rest of the lifecycle through well-defined phases: Pending → Scheduled → Active → Removing → Inactive.

 

Example use cases:

 

• Cost optimization: only run expensive GPU or bare-metal hardware during business hours
• Energy efficiency: power down non-critical capacity overnight and on weekends
• Predictable scaling: expand clusters for known workload patterns (batch windows, market hours, nightly CI)
• Ephemeral test environments: provision staging clusters on a schedule and tear them down cleanly

 

The most current release is v0.2.0, available at https://github.com/finos/5-spot/releases/tag/v0.2.0. Installation is via raw Kubernetes manifests from the repo (`kubectl apply -f deploy/crds/scheduledmachine.yaml` then `kubectl apply -R -f deploy/deployment/`). Documentation is available at https://5spot.finos.org/ and you can reach out to the project team on the FINOS Slack in #5-spot (join at https://finos.org/slack) or via GitHub Discussions at https://github.com/finos/5-spot/discussions. Please also see the blog post!

 

Your feedback, issues, and contributions are more than welcome. See https://github.com/finos/5-spot/blob/main/CONTRIBUTING.md for more information on how to contribute, and here are a few areas where we could use help: https://github.com/finos/5-spot/issues?q=is%3Aissue+is%3Aopen+label%3A%22good+first+issue%22%2C%22help+wanted%22.

Thanks to the FINOS Community for a warm welcome!

 

Erick Bourgeois