Spot Instances
ELI5 — The Vibe Check
Spot Instances are like standby flights for cloud computing. AWS has spare capacity? You get it for up to 90% off. The catch: AWS can take it back with 2 minutes' notice. Perfect for batch jobs, CI/CD, and anything that can handle interruption. It's cloud computing for people who like to live dangerously (and cheaply).
Real Talk
Spot Instances provide access to unused cloud compute capacity at steep discounts (up to 90% off on-demand pricing). They can be interrupted with short notice (2 minutes on AWS) when capacity is needed. Best suited for fault-tolerant, stateless workloads like batch processing, CI/CD, data analysis, and container clusters with graceful handling of interruptions.
When You'll Hear This
"Our CI pipeline runs on spot instances — we save 80% and can tolerate occasional preemption." / "Use spot instances for the worker nodes, reserved for the control plane."
Related Terms
Batch
A batch is a small group of training examples that the model processes at once before updating its weights.
Preemptible VMs
Preemptible VMs are Google Cloud's version of spot instances.
Reserved Instances
Reserved Instances are like buying a gym membership instead of paying per visit.