Amazon EC2 spot instances - is there a catch ?
- by gareth_bowles
I needed to start a new EC2 instance today and decided to try out the new spot instances, where you can reduce your instance cost by bidding on the maximum per-hour price you're prepared to pay. Since today's spot price was only 35c / hour, compared with 85c / hour for an on-demand instance, I was wondering: if I just bid a really high price, say $1 / hour, can I effectively be sure of getting a much cheaper long-running instance than an on-demand instance (since the spot instances are only charged by the current spot price) ?
I suppose it's theoretically possible for the spot price to go over the on-demand price, but as far as I can tell from the data on the AWS site, the spot price has always been well below that.