Amazon has snapped up ClusterK, Inc., a startup that allows other companies to save up to 90 percent on Amazon Web Services EC2 spot clusters.

The price of the acquisition hasn’t been publicly announced, but is reported to have been in the range of $20 million to $50 million.

ClusterK offers a Software as a Service (SaaS) platform that enables high availability in the AWS Spot Market, with the resultant savings; the EC2 spot market allows customers to name their price for compute capacity, and ClusterK helps facilitate this with an aim to optimize the process for the lowest possible prices.

Optimizing infrastructure

The service enables rollouts across multiple Spot slices in multiple markets and offensively rebalances client applications, optimizing infrastructure for performance, availability and the lowest cost.

It’s a complementary acquisition for Amazon and may indicate an interest from the e-commerce giant in building up its Spot Market, which while being around for years isn’t one of the more heavily promoted products within the AWS family.

The deal will also sit well with companies with Hadoop deployments, as it provides downwards pressure on Amazon’s combo of the Spot Market and Elastic MapReduce, a service announced back in 2013.

Lower prices for Cloud computing

Cloud prices are getting lower and lower every year, but what this acquisition does is provide Amazon with a marketing edge in making it easier for AWS customers to obtain ever lower prices for their Cloud computing requirement.

As for ClusterK, there’s not a huge amount of details about its past, except that it was founded in 2013 and raised an undisclosed seed round in February 2014. The company was founded by the core technical engineering team from Moleculo, a Stanford long read DNA technology group.