Maximizing savings for flexible workloads
As with RIs and SPs, Spot provides you a discount on EC2 usage but with a different rate. Unlike RIs and SPs, Spot is ideal for workloads that can withstand interruption and can be instance-flexible, meaning you generally don’t care which instance type you use to complete a task. For these trade-offs, Spot provides steeper discounts than SPs.
AWS first offered the m1.small instance type back in 2006. At the time of writing, AWS now provides over 400 different types of instances to use. We can safely assume that AWS has a lot of spare capacity. AWS offers this spare capacity to customers with a steep discount compared to on-demand instances on the condition that AWS can retake that spare capacity back when needed. AWS provides a 2-minute warning, so this process doesn’t abruptly terminate your running workload.
Spot terminations were more prevalent in the earlier years of AWS. Today, given the growing number of instances...
