Amazon EC2 Spot Instances

Werner Vogels: Today we launched a new option for acquiring Amazon EC2 Spot Instances Using this option, customers bid any price they like on unused Amazon EC2 capacity and run those instances for as long their bid exceeds the current “Spot Price.” Spot Instances are ideal for tasks that can be flexible as to when they start and stop.

Spot Instances are ideal for Amazon EC2 customers who have workloads that are flexible as to when its tasks are run. These can be incidental tasks, such as the analysis of a particular dataset, or tasks where the amount of work to be done is almost never finished, such as media conversion from a Hollywood’s studio’s movie vault, or web crawling for a search indexing company.

There’s a whole class of applications that this is a game changer for.  It will be interesting to follow its adoption.

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