Core concept
Spot price fluctuates per instance type + AZ. Spot Fleet + Auto Scaling with mixed instance types = higher availability.
Advertisement
How it works
Interruption disrupts stateful work. Checkpoint frequently. Use Spot Instance Termination Notice via metadata endpoint.
Advertisement
Trade-offs + gotchas
Batch processing. CI runners. Big data (EMR spot). ML training with checkpointing. NOT for prod databases or user-facing sync workloads.