Amazon EC2 Spot Instances now available in AWS GovCloud (US) Regions

Amazon EC2 Spot Instances are now available in Amazon Web Services (AWS) GovCloud (US) Regions. AWS GovCloud (US) is Amazon’s isolated cloud infrastructure and services designed to address specific regulatory and compliance requirements of US Government agencies, as well as contractors, educational institutions, and other US customers that run sensitive workloads in the cloud. With Amazon EC2 Spot Instances, AWS GovCloud (US) customers can take advantage of the largest pool of cost-effective compute capacity in the world, while realizing savings up to 90% compared to on-demand prices. Spot Instances provide acceleration, scale, and cost savings that are ideal for fault-tolerant, flexible, loosely coupled, and stateless workloads.

Spot Instance availability in AWS GovCloud (US) is also compatible with Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling groups (ASGs). Now you can include Spot Instances with On-Demand and Reserved Instances (RIs) in a single ASG. When setting up an ASG, you can specify what percentage of your ASG capacity should be fulfilled by On-Demand instances or RIs, and what percentage with Spot Instances. EC2 Auto Scaling then provisions the lowest price or capacity-optimized combination of instances to meet the desired capacity based on these preferences. The capacity-optimized allocation strategy attempts to provision Spot Instances from the most available Spot Instance pools by analyzing capacity metrics.

This strategy is a good choice for workloads that have a higher cost of interruption such as big data and analytics, image and media rendering, machine learning, and high performance computing. The lowest price allocation strategy launches Spot Instances based on diversification across ‘N’ lowest priced pools.

With the addition of EC2 Spot Instances for AWS GovCloud (US), Spot Instances are now available in 21 Regions and 66 Availability Zones. You can use Spot Instances to accelerate containerized workloads, big data, CI/CD, and web services at a low cost. Containers are often stateless and fault-tolerant, making them a great fit for Spot Instances. You can easily run Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS), Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS), and Kubernetes clusters at scale, using Spot with On-Demand and RIs.

Due to the operating scale of AWS, Spot Instances can offer the scale and cost savings to run hyperscale data analysis, perfect for workloads on Hadoop or Spark. With AWS, you have easy access to unused compute capacity at such massive scale — all at up to a 90% discount. See the Spot Instances detail page for more information and create your Spot Instance.

Visit AWS GovCloud (US) to learn more, or request follow-up from an AWS GovCloud (US) expert to discuss your specific compliance requirements.

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