Spot Instance
ELI5 — The Vibe Check
A spot instance is cheap cloud computing that can be taken away from you at any moment. It's like getting a deeply discounted hotel room, but they can kick you out whenever a full-price guest shows up. You save 60-90% compared to regular pricing. The catch? Your server might vanish in 2 minutes. Perfect for batch processing. Terrible for anything that needs to stay running.
Real Talk
Spot instances (AWS) or preemptible VMs (GCP) are spare cloud compute capacity offered at steep discounts (60-90% off on-demand pricing) with the caveat that the provider can reclaim them with minimal notice (typically 2 minutes on AWS). They're ideal for fault-tolerant, stateless workloads like batch processing, data analysis, CI/CD runners, and training ML models. Not suitable for databases or user-facing services.
When You'll Hear This
"We run our ML training on spot instances and save 70%." / "The CI pipeline failed because the spot instance got reclaimed mid-build."
Related Terms
Auto Scaling
Auto scaling is when the cloud automatically adds more servers when traffic spikes and removes them when it drops, so you're not paying for idle machines a...
Cloud Computing
Cloud computing means using computers that live in someone else's giant warehouse instead of your own machine.
EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud)
EC2 is AWS's way of renting you a virtual computer in the cloud. You pick how powerful it is, what OS it runs, and pay by the hour.
Serverless
Serverless doesn't mean there are no servers — it means YOU don't have to think about servers. Someone else manages them, scales them, and patches them.