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

IAM (Identity and Access Management)

A framework for managing digital identities and controlling who can access which cloud resources and services.

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

PaaS (Platform as a Service)

A cloud service model that provides a platform for developers to build, deploy, and manage applications without managing infrastructure.

IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service)

A cloud service model providing virtualized computing resources like servers, storage, and networking over the internet.

Kubernetes Service

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

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

View All Cloud Computing Terms →