Spot Instances

  • Take advantage of unused EC2 capacity in AWS.

  • They can have up to a 90% discount compared to On-Demand prices.

Concepts

  • Spot Instance pool:

    • A set of unused EC2 instances with the same properties, such as the same instance type, operating system, Availability Zone, and network platform.

  • Spot price:

    • The current price of a Spot Instance per hour.

  • Spot Instance request:

    • A request for a Spot Instance.

    • The request provides the maximum price per hour that you are willing to pay for a Spot Instance.

    • They can either be one-time or persistent (persistent means the request would keep replacing instances if it does not meet your specified target).

    • Cancelling a spot request won't terminate instances.

      • To cancel a persistent request, first you would have to cancel the request, then terminate the instances.

  • Spot Instance interruption:

    • EC2 terminates/stops your Spot Instance when the Spot price exceeds the maximum price for your request or capacity is no longer available.

    • EC2 provides a Spot Instance interruption notice, which gives the instance a two-minute warning before it is interrupted.

Spot Fleets

  • A collection, or fleet, of Spot Instances, and optionally On-Demand Instances.

  • The Spot Fleet attempts to launch the number of Spot Instances and On-Demand Instances to meet the target capacity that you specified in the Spot Fleet request.

  • Spot Instance pool:

    • A set of unused EC2 instances with the same properties, such as the same instance type, operating system, Availability Zone, and network platform.

  • Strategies:

    • lowestPrice

      • The Spot Instances come from the pool with the lowest price.

      • This is the default strategy.

      • For cost optimization.

    • diversified

      • The Spot Instances are distributed across all pools.

      • For highly available and long workloads.

    • capacityOptimized

      • The Spot Instances come from the pool with optimal capacity for the number of instances that are launching.

      • For best performance.

Spot Blocks

  • These are spot Instances with a defined duration.

  • They are designed not to be interrupted and will run continuously for the duration you select.

    • Makes them ideal for jobs that take a finite time to complete, such as batch processing, encoding and rendering, modelling and analysis, and continuous integration.

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