Spot Pricing

Spot Pricing allows you to bid on unused cloud compute capacity for discounts up to 90% off standard on-demand rates.

Cloud providers like AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud use Spot Pricing to monetize spare data center capacity that would otherwise sit idle. By opting into this model, you access the same high-performance hardware (think NVIDIA H100 GPUs or high-memory R6g instances) at a fraction of the cost, often saving between 60% and 90%. The trade-off is preemption: the provider can reclaim the resources with a brief warning (usually 30 seconds to 2 minutes) if a full-price customer needs them. This makes Spot Pricing the gold standard for fault-tolerant, stateless workloads like CI/CD pipelines, big data processing with Apache Spark, and large-scale rendering jobs where cost efficiency outweighs immediate persistence.

https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/spot/