Comparison
On-demand pricingvsSpot instance
On-demand pricing
you pay the full hourly rate for capacity you can give back at any second, which is the most expensive way to run anything steady.
Paying the published rate per unit of time with no commitment and no interruption risk. It is the right price for genuinely unpredictable or short-lived workloads and the wrong one for a baseline that has run continuously for two years. Most cloud overspend is simply a steady-state fleet still being billed this way because nobody did the commitment exercise.
Full entry →Spot instance
the machine costs a fraction of the normal price and can be taken away from you with two minutes' notice.
Buying spare capacity at a steep discount on the condition that the provider may reclaim it. It is excellent for anything interruptible and replayable — batch, builds, stateless workers — and hostile to anything that cannot be moved quickly. Using it well means diversifying across instance types and zones so a reclamation in one pool does not take your whole fleet.
Full entry →