Spot instance
Also known as: Preemptible VM, Spot VM
A spot instance is spare cloud capacity sold at a steep discount (often 70–90% off on-demand) that the provider can reclaim with little notice.
Spot (AWS), Spot VMs (Azure), and Preemptible/Spot VMs (Google Cloud) are ideal for fault-tolerant, interruptible work — batch processing, CI, rendering, and stateless workers behind a queue. The catch is that the provider can terminate the instance when it needs the capacity back, typically with a short warning.
Spot pairs well with autoscaling and checkpointing so interruptions degrade throughput rather than break the workload.
Reserved vs spot vs on-demand →
Related terms
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