Canvas CloudAI
Canvas Cloud AI

Spot Instances

intermediate
cloud
Enhanced Content

Definition

Spare cloud computing capacity available at steep discounts (up to 90% off) but can be reclaimed with short notice. Like flying standby for much cheaper tickets, but you might get bumped.

Real-World Example

A machine learning team uses spot instances to train models at 70% less cost, with checkpoints to resume if instances are interrupted.

Cloud Provider Equivalencies

All are discounted, interruptible VM capacity. AWS uses Spot pricing and interruption notices; Azure uses Spot VMs with eviction policies; GCP Spot VMs are fixed-discount, preemptible VMs; OCI Preemptible Instances can be reclaimed by Oracle with short notice.

AWS
Amazon EC2 Spot Instances
AZ
Azure Spot Virtual Machines
GCP
Google Cloud Spot VMs
OCI
OCI Preemptible Instances

Compare Across Cloud Providers

Spot Instances is available across all major cloud platforms. Compare equivalent services:

AWS
Amazon EC2 Spot Instances
Azure
Azure Spot Virtual Machines
Google Cloud
Spot VMs
Oracle Cloud
Preemptible Instances

Explore More Cloud Computing Terms