AWS Spot Instances
AWS Spot Instances are spare Amazon EC2 computing capacity available at steep discounts (up to 90% off On-Demand prices) compared to On-Demand Instances. They allow users to bid on unused EC2 capacity, but instances can be interrupted with a two-minute warning when AWS needs the capacity back. This makes them ideal for fault-tolerant, flexible workloads like batch processing, data analysis, and containerized applications.
Developers should use AWS Spot Instances for cost-sensitive, interruptible workloads such as big data analytics, CI/CD pipelines, or rendering jobs where tasks can be checkpointed and resumed. They are particularly valuable in scalable architectures like Kubernetes clusters or serverless backends, where instance termination can be managed gracefully without data loss. Avoid them for stateful, long-running applications like databases unless paired with robust fault-tolerance mechanisms.