When to Use Spot Instances

You can use Spot Instances to purchase extra computing power at a discounted price to supplement On-Demand Instances. They are a more affordable option than On-Demand EC2 pricing. Flexible and fault-tolerant applications and high-performance workloads use them. Spot Instances are also ideal for flexible workloads, such as rendering, testing applications, and continuous integrations (CI).

AWS Spot Instances help reduce On-Demand Instance costs on EC2. You can use Spot Instances to supplement On-Demand Instances. Spot Instances shouldn’t handle all workloads because of potential service disruptions.

Spot Instances help reduce costs significantly. You can minimize AWS costs by up to 90 percent when using Spot Instances. The hourly price of a Spot Instance is a spot price. The price of a Spot Instance depends on the demand and supply factors. Tools, such as the nOps Spot Advisor, enable users to understand the pricing model and make the right decisions.

You can also use Spot Instances for the following:

Batch Processing Tasks. Batch processing workloads involve processing large amounts of data at a go. Tasks, such as generating reports, processing documents, and encoding video, are ideal for Spot Instances. This is because they are mostly stateless and rely intensively on numerous processors.

Continuous Integration (CI). With Spot Instances, you can easily scale CI/CD tasks running on apps like GitLab and Jenkins. CI tasks run on irregular schedules, and using On-Demand instances can be extremely expensive.

High-Performance Computing. You can use Spot Instances for applications and workloads that require a fast network, quick storage, massive amounts of memory, and high computing capabilities. AI- and ML-powered applications can be costly on GPU instances, making Spot Instances the best option.

Big Data Analytics. You can use Spot Instances to reduce the cost of big data analytics. Analyzing massive data sets to derive useful insights is an intensive process that works best with Spot Instances. Spot Instances provide instant scalability, which improves performance.

Rendering Workloads. The AWS computing capacity allows you to render noncostly workloads with Spot Instances.

Spot Instances are ideal because:

• They allow easier automation
• They are easy to use
• You can use them on a massive scale
• You can launch instantly every time there is an active spot request. 

It’s not advisable to use Spot Instances for inflexible and fault-intolerant workloads. A slight disruption can affect the workload intensively, affecting performance. You shouldn’t use Spot Instances on databases, caches, and queues. These processes are not fault-tolerant and can be difficult to recover.

You can use Spot Instances to reduce EC2 costs. However, managing them tends to be challenging because of timing and disruptions. But as long as you can handle the disruptions, you can set more workloads to run on AWS Spot Instances. 

At nOps, we can help in handling disruptions to have more applications running on Spot Instances. We use the nOps Spot Advisor to help make the right pricing choices for your organization. Contact us today to learn more about Spot Instance pricing.