Introducing Amazon EC2 Spot Instances for Specific Duration Workloads
Spot Instances with a defined duration (also known as Spot blocks) are no longer available to new customers since July 1, 2021. For customers that have previously used the feature, we will continue to support Spot Instances with a defined duration until December 31, 2022.
You can now request Amazon EC2 Spot instances to run continuously, for up to six hours, at a flat rate that saves you up to 50% compared to On-Demand prices. This enables you to reduce costs when running finite duration tasks such as batch processing, encoding and rendering, modeling and analysis, and continuous integration jobs.
To get started, specify the duration you want your instance(s) to run – between one and six hours – when placing a Spot instances request. When Spot instance capacity is available for the requested duration, your instances will launch and run for that duration for a flat hourly price. Once the time block ends, your instance will be terminated automatically.
To learn more about how to request Spot instances that run for a defined duration, visit Using Spot Blocks in the Amazon EC2 User Guide. Pricing is based on block duration and available capacity. To view current Spot instance prices, visit Amazon EC2 Spot Pricing.