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.

Related Terms

A storage architecture that manages data as objects with metadata and unique identifiers, ideal for unstructured data at scale.

Region and Availability Zone

Geographic locations where cloud providers operate data centers, with zones providing redundancy within a region.

A computing environment that combines on-premises infrastructure with public cloud services, allowing data and applications to move between them.

Virtual Machine (VM)

A software-based emulation of a physical computer that runs its own operating system and applications.

Lambda Function (Cloud)

An AWS serverless compute service that runs code in response to events without provisioning or managing servers.

Cloud Migration

The process of moving applications, data, and workloads from on-premises infrastructure to cloud computing environments.

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