Spot instances
Last updated 2026-06-04
Spot instances (also called spot VMs or preemptible VMs) are unused cloud capacity that providers offer at a large discount, commonly 60 to 90 percent below on-demand prices, in exchange for the right to reclaim them on short notice when that capacity is needed elsewhere. Before reclaiming an instance, the provider issues a brief interruption notice, giving the workload a small window to checkpoint state, drain connections, or reschedule. Because of this, spot is ideal for fault-tolerant, interruptible workloads such as batch processing, data pipelines, CI jobs, rendering, and stateless Kubernetes pods, but a poor fit for stateful databases or long-running jobs that cannot recover from sudden loss. Using spot safely requires automation that handles interruptions gracefully and diversifies across multiple instance types and availability zones, so the loss of one capacity pool does not stall the workload. LevelFour incorporates spot capacity into Kubernetes compute optimization.
Frequently asked questions
- When should you use spot instances and when should you avoid them?
- Use spot instances for fault-tolerant, interruptible workloads such as batch processing, data pipelines, CI jobs, rendering, and stateless Kubernetes pods. Avoid them for stateful databases, long-running jobs, or anything that cannot checkpoint and recover quickly, since the provider can reclaim the capacity on short notice.
- How much can spot instances save compared to on-demand pricing?
- Spot instances are typically discounted 60 to 90 percent below on-demand prices, because they use the provider's spare capacity. The exact discount varies by instance type, region, and availability zone, and prices fluctuate with supply and demand, so diversifying across pools helps capture consistent savings.
Related terms
LevelFour automates this across AWS, GCP, Azure, and Kubernetes with automated infrastructure-as-code pull requests.