Amazon EC2

Why Amazon EC2 Spot Instances?

Amazon EC2 Spot Instances allow customers to save up to 90% compared to On-Demand pricing by leveraging spare EC2 capacity. Spot Instances are a good fit for fault tolerant workloads that are flexible to run on multiple instance types.

The table below shows the average interruption frequency and savings over on-demand rates over last 30 days for various instance pools. While the average frequency of interruption across all Regions and Instance types has historically been <5%, the actual interruption rate for your workloads will depend on point-in-time available capacity. You can use Spot Placement Score to get a near real-time likelihood of your Spot request succeeding in a Region or Availability Zone.

To improve your application’s availability on Spot, we recommend you to be as diverse as possible in your instance type and Availability Zone selection. You can use attribute-based instance type selection (ABS), to easily express your instance requirements in the form of attributes, such as vCPU, memory, and storage, ensuring optimal flexibility of your configuration. Please visit Spot best practices to learn more about how you can improve your Spot experience.

         

* Savings compared to On-Demand are calculated over the last 30 days. Please note that price history data is averaged across Availability Zones and may be delayed. To view current Spot prices, visit the Spot Price History in the AWS Management Console for up to date pricing information for each Availability Zone.

Legend:
Frequency of interruption represents the rate at which Spot has reclaimed capacity during the trailing month. They are in ranges of < 5%, 5-10%, 10-15%, 15-20% and >20%.

For more examples on how to use Spot price history to build price aware applications please visit (aws-spot-labs).