I don't have much experience as a sysadmin or with amazon aws, so I hope someone can explain in simple terms or refer me to a good guide on how to achieve the below. I have a system running on ec2 and amazon rds getting data in and saving it to the db. I need to run a script once a day (at the end of the day) to process all that data and prepare a daily report. This process will take approximately an hour to run. It needs to run on a high memory instance.. From what i've read so far, I guess the best way to do it is to have a high memory spot instance run every day, set it up to execute the script on startup and and shut down when done. Is that the right way to do it? If so, how to do it? how to tell the spot instance to run every day? through a cron job on the other server or is there a better way? How to set it up to run the script on startup? through cloudinit? Any help would be appreciated. One last thing, the job is not very time sensitive as long as it runs every day.. thanks