Overview
Spot Instances are discounted, ephemeral Cloud Servers: they provide the same resources as on-demand servers at a reduced price, in exchange for the possibility of being revoked at any time with a short notice.
They are available for every Cloud Server family: Shared CPU, GPU, High Memory and NPU.
In short
The discount is locked at creation time and never changes for the whole life of the server. In exchange, the instance can be revoked at any time, with a 2-minute notice. While it is active it can still be promoted to on-demand to keep it safe.
Use cases
Spot Instances are ideal for interruptible and fault-tolerant workloads, where the termination of a single instance does not compromise the overall job:
- batch processing and work queues (encoding, rendering, ETL, data analysis);
- CI/CD pipelines and ephemeral test/staging environments;
- model training with periodic checkpoints;
- horizontally scalable stateless workers, where capacity is redundant.
They are not suitable for services that must stay up without interruption (primary databases, single-instance production endpoints, sessions with non-persisted state). In those cases prefer an on-demand server, or create the spot and then promote it when the load becomes critical.
How they work
- Price locked at creation — the discount is a fixed snapshot: it is recorded when the instance is created and stays identical while the server is spot, regardless of any later price-list changes. See Billing.
- Revocation with notice — the instance can be revoked at any time: a 2-minute notice is sent by email and when it expires the instance is terminated. This is the reclaim mechanism, described in Termination and notice.
- Promotion — while the instance is active it can be promoted to on-demand: the resource is locked and the instance can no longer be revoked. See Promotion.
- Pay-as-you-go billing — the discounted window is part of the normal hourly usage of the server, with no separate billing. See Billing.
Limitations
On active Spot Instances, Templates, Snapshots and Reserved plans are not available. After a promotion these features become usable again. Details in Limitations.