Cloud Computing Intermediate

What is Spot Instance?

Discounted cloud compute instances that use spare capacity at significantly lower prices but can be interrupted with short notice.

Spot instances (AWS) or preemptible VMs (GCP) offer 60-90% discounts by using unused cloud capacity. The trade-off is that the provider can reclaim instances with 2-minute notice when demand increases.

Ideal for fault-tolerant, stateless workloads: batch processing, CI/CD builds, data analysis, rendering, and distributed computing. Not suitable for databases or long-running stateful applications. Spot fleets and interruption handling strategies maximize savings safely.

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Related Terms

SaaS (Software as a Service)

A cloud delivery model where software applications are hosted and managed by a provider and accessed by users over the internet.

A serverless compute service that runs code in response to events without requiring server management or infrastructure provisioning.

Automatically adjusting the number of computing resources based on current demand to maintain performance and optimize costs.

Cloud Computing

The delivery of computing services over the internet, including servers, storage, databases, and software on demand.

A distributed computing paradigm that processes data near the source of generation rather than in a centralized cloud data center.

Cloud Monitoring

Services that collect, analyze, and alert on metrics, logs, and traces from cloud infrastructure and applications.

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