Spot Instance
Definition
A Spot Instance is a way to purchase spare computing capacity in the cloud at a steep discount compared to on-demand prices. The catch is that the cloud provider can reclaim the capacity at any time with a short notice (usually two minutes).
Why It Matters
Spot Instances can provide massive cost savings (up to 90%) for workloads that are fault-tolerant, stateless, and can handle interruptions. They are ideal for tasks like batch processing, data analysis, and testing environments.
Contextual Example
A research institution needs to run a large-scale data analysis that will take many hours. They use a fleet of Spot Instances to perform the computation. If some instances are terminated, the job can automatically resume the work on new Spot Instances, taking advantage of the huge cost savings.
Common Misunderstandings
- Spot Instances are not suitable for critical workloads like databases or user-facing web servers that cannot tolerate interruptions.
- All major cloud providers offer a similar type of service.