Amazon EC2 Spot Instances
Run fault-tolerant workloads for up to 90% off
Amazon EC2 Spot Instances let you take advantage of unused EC2 capacity in the Amazon Web Services 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 other test & development workloads. Because Spot Instances are tightly integrated with Amazon Web Services services such as Auto Scaling, EMR, ECS, CloudFormation, Data Pipeline and Amazon 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 and RIs to further optimize workload cost with performance. Due to the operating scale of Amazon Web services, Spot Instances can offer the scale and cost savings to run hyper-scale workloads. Only on Amazon Web Services, you have easy access to unused compute capacity at such massive scale - all at up to a 90% discount.
Benefits
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, and RIs using EC2 Auto Scaling to optimize workload cost with performance.
Scale Your Application
Spot Instances offer you the advantages of the massive operating scale of Amazon Web Services. You can run hyperscale workloads at a significant cost savings or you can accelerate your workloads by running parallel tasks. Learn more »
Easy to Use
Spot Instances are easy to launch. Add a single parameter to the same API used to launch OD instances - instances will be launched immediately as long as capacity is available. Learn more »
How it works
Step 1: Before running Spot instances, refer to using Spot instances.
Step 2: Choose all instances and Availability Zones that work for your workloads.
Step 3: Select your interruption behavior (Stop/Terminate).
Step 4: Launch and Scale your target capacity.
Use Cases
Spot Instances are well suited to a variety of workloads. The more distributed, scalable, and fault tolerant your application, the easier it is to save money and increase throughput.
Analytics
Complex analytics such as log scanning or simulations, typically performed as batch jobs, can be completed cost-effectively with Spot Instances.
Financial Modeling and Analysis
Financial Services firms use Spot instances to reduce the time and cost to perform complex analysis ranging from wealth management simulations to Counterparty Value Analytics.
Image and Media Encoding
Media and Entertainment companies can cost-effectively render and encode media assets using Spot Instances, scaling their infrastructures based on demand.
Testing
Load, integration, canary, and security testing all benefit from the elasticity and price savings associated with Spot Instances.
Big Data
Spot Instances can be used with tools like Amazon Elastic MapReduce to process massive amounts of data.
Geospatial Analysis
Geographic information system (GIS) providers use Spot to speed up and reduce the cost of batch processing jobs such rendering and satellite image processing.
Scientific Computing
Scientific researchers and high performance computing customers use Spot to cost-effectively perform simulations ranging from drug discovery to genomics research.
Web Crawling
Web crawling processes can easily and cost-effectively scale-out on Spot Instances by leveraging Amazon Elastic MapReduce or other tools to get work done faster and typically cheaper.
Customer Examples
Intended Usage and Restrictions
Your use of this service is subject to the Amazon Web Services Customer Agreement.
