Pricing & Billing
Spot Instance
Spare cloud capacity sold at a steep discount that the provider can reclaim on short notice, ideal for interruptible workloads.
Spot instances are a provider's spare capacity, sold cheap on the condition they can take it back whenever they need it. The discount is dramatic, frequently 70 to 90 percent off on-demand, in exchange for the risk that your instance gets terminated with a couple of minutes' warning. AWS calls them spot, Google Cloud calls them preemptible, the idea is the same.
They're perfect for work that can survive interruption: batch processing, video encoding, CI pipelines, machine-learning training with checkpoints, anything that can pause and resume. Architect the workload to handle a sudden shutdown gracefully and you get near-free compute for it. Use them for a production database and you're one reclamation away from an outage.
The skill is matching workload to interruption tolerance. Fault-tolerant, stateless, or checkpointed jobs thrive on spot. User-facing services that must stay up do not. Many teams run a stable on-demand or reserved base and burst the interruptible work onto spot capacity.