Spot Instance

Noun · Development

Definitions

  1. Spare cloud compute capacity sold at steep discounts (up to 90% off on-demand pricing) with the caveat that instances can be reclaimed with short notice (typically 2 minutes). Ideal for fault-tolerant workloads like batch processing, CI/CD, and training ML models.

    In plain English: Heavily discounted cloud servers that can be taken away at any moment, perfect for tasks that can handle interruptions.

    Example: "We run our ML training jobs on spot instances — if one gets preempted, the checkpoint system resumes on a new instance."

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