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.

Learn More About This Topic

AWS EC2 & VPC for Linux Administrator

Related reading

AWS Lambda & Serverless for Beginners

Related reading

AWS for Linux Administrators

Related reading

Related Terms

Microsoft's cloud computing platform offering IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS services for building, deploying, and managing applications.

An AWS service that provisions and manages cloud resources using declarative JSON or YAML templates.

Kubernetes Service

An abstraction that provides a stable network endpoint for accessing a group of Pods, handling load balancing and service discovery.

Kubernetes Namespace

A virtual cluster within a Kubernetes cluster that provides scope for names and enables resource isolation between teams or environments.

Cloud Storage Tiers

Different storage classes offered by cloud providers, optimized for varying access patterns from frequent to archival use.

Elastic Load Balancing

An AWS service that automatically distributes incoming application traffic across multiple targets like EC2 instances and containers.

View All Cloud Computing Terms →