Amazon EC2 Spot Instances
Amazon EC2 Spot Instances let you take advantage of unused EC2 capacity in the AWS cloud. Spot Instances are available at up to a 90% discount compared to On-Demand prices. You can use Spot Instances for various stateless, fault-tolerant, or flexible applications such as big data, containerized workloads, CI/CD, web servers, high-performance computing (HPC), and test & development workloads. Because Spot Instances are tightly integrated with AWS services such as Auto Scaling, EMR, ECS, CloudFormation, Data Pipeline and AWS Batch, you can choose how to launch and maintain your applications running on Spot Instances.
Moreover, you can easily combine Spot Instances with On-Demand, RIs and Savings Plans Instances to further optimize workload cost with performance. Due to the operating scale of AWS, Spot Instances can offer the scale and cost savings to run hyper-scale workloads. You also have the option to hibernate, stop or terminate your Spot Instances when EC2 reclaims the capacity back with two-minutes of notice. Only on AWS, you have easy access to unused compute capacity at such massive scale - all at up to a 90% discount.
Why use Amazon EC2 Spot Instances?
Low, predictable prices
You can purchase Spot Instances at prices up to 90% lower than On-Demand instances. Moreover, you can provision capacity across Spot, On-Demand, RIs, and Savings Plans Instances using EC2 Auto Scaling to optimize workload cost with performance.
Massive scale
Spot offers you the advantages of the massive operating scale of AWS. You can run hyperscale workloads at a significant cost savings or you can accelerate your workloads by running parallel tasks.
Easy to use
It’s easy to launch, scale and manage Spot Instances through AWS services, like EC2 Auto Scaling and ECS, or integrated third parties, like Terraform and Jenkins.
How Spot Instances work?
Combine Spot Instances with RIs and On-Demand Instances using EC2 Auto Scaling to optimize workload cost with performance. Click to see other the Best Practices to use Spot effectively.
Big data and analytics
Fast-track big data and machine learning workloads by using Spot Instances with Amazon EMR, Hadoop, or Spark to process massive amounts of data.
Containerized workloads
Containers are often stateless and fault-tolerant, and are a great fit for Spot Instances. You can create Amazon ECS, Amazon EKS, or self-managed Kubernetes clusters on Spot to run containerized workloads of any scale.
CI/CD & testing
CI/CD workloads are fault-tolerant and are built to take advantage of the cost savings offered by Spot Instances. You can launch your CI/CD pipelines in the AWS cloud quickly and cost-effectively with the EC2 Spot Fleet plug-in.
Web services
Maintain optimal web performance during peak traffic at low costs using Spot Instances. You can deploy a fleet of EC2 instances behind a load balancer using EC2 Auto Scaling to scale to tens of thousands of Spot Instances.
Image and media rendering
Media & Entertainment studios can cost-effectively manage rendering workloads using Spot Instances, scaling on-premises or cloud infrastructures with near limitless capacity as projects and timelines demand.
High performance computing
Accelerate loosely coupled or embarrasingly parallel HPC workloads such as genomic sequencing and algorithmic trading. You can use Spot Instances with other AWS services such as AWS Batch to run HPC workloads.
See the open source software integrations roadmap for Spot Instances on Github here.
Customers
More and more businesses are using Amazon EC2 Spot Instances to run and scale their infrastructure cost-effectively. Here are some examples of how customers have achieved business agility, cost savings, and scale with EC2 Spot Instances. For more details, visit Amazon EC2 Spot Customers page.
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