AWS EC2 Spot Instance
An AWS EC2 Spot Instance is an EC2 instance with a dynamic price.
- Context:
- It can (typically) have an EC2 Instance Spot Price.
- …
- Counter-Example(s):
- an Fixed-Price EC2 Instance, such as an EC2 Reserved Instance or an EC2 On-Demand Instance.
- See: Auction, EC2 Instance Type, EC2 Spot Bid Advisor.
References
2016
- http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/spot/bid-advisor/
- QUOTE: The Spot Bid Advisor analyzes Spot price history to help you determine a bid price that suits your needs. You should weigh your application’s tolerance for interruption and your cost saving goals when selecting a Spot instance and bid price. The lower your frequency of being outbid, the longer your Spot instances are likely to run without interruption.
Tip: Deploying your application across many instance types will further enhance availability. Consider using Spot fleet, which makes diversification across multiple instance types and availability zones easier.
We recommend starting with instance types having lower frequency of being outbid and adding more instance types as you improve your application’s flexibility and fault tolerance.
- QUOTE: The Spot Bid Advisor analyzes Spot price history to help you determine a bid price that suits your needs. You should weigh your application’s tolerance for interruption and your cost saving goals when selecting a Spot instance and bid price. The lower your frequency of being outbid, the longer your Spot instances are likely to run without interruption.
2014
- http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/purchasing-options/spot-instances/
- Spot Instances allow you to name your own price for Amazon EC2 computing capacity. You simply bid on spare Amazon EC2 instances and run them whenever your bid exceeds the current Spot Price, which varies in real-time based on supply and demand. The Spot Instance pricing model complements the On-Demand and Reserved Instance pricing models, providing potentially the most cost-effective option for obtaining compute capacity, depending on your application.
Spot Instances can significantly lower your computing costs for time-flexible, interruption-tolerant tasks. Spot prices are often significantly less than On-Demand prices for the same EC2 instance types (see current Spot prices below). Additionally, for some distributed, fault-tolerant tasks (like web-crawling or Monte Carlo applications), you may be able to simultaneously accelerate your computational task and reduce its overall cost by opportunistically incorporating Spot Instances.
- Spot Instances allow you to name your own price for Amazon EC2 computing capacity. You simply bid on spare Amazon EC2 instances and run them whenever your bid exceeds the current Spot Price, which varies in real-time based on supply and demand. The Spot Instance pricing model complements the On-Demand and Reserved Instance pricing models, providing potentially the most cost-effective option for obtaining compute capacity, depending on your application.