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Product Introduction

Spot Instance Overview

Last updated: 2025-09-10 22:04:35

What are Spot Instances

Spot Instances are pay-as-you-go cloud server instances that offer the same performance as regular On-Demand instances but at significantly discounted prices, effectively reducing your cloud server usage costs. Spot Instance prices fluctuate in real-time based on market supply and demand, with core features including:

  • Discounted Pricing: Spot Instances provide more favorable prices compared to On-Demand instances
  • System Interruption Mechanism: The system may automatically reclaim instance resources when market conditions change

Through Spot Instances, you can obtain the same computing performance at a lower cost, but you need to bear the risk that instances may be automatically reclaimed by the system.

Operation Process

After successful purchase, Spot Instances will automatically start and run normally. You can deploy and manage your business just like using regular instances. The system continuously monitors market conditions, checks instance inventory in real-time, and compares your bid with current market prices. The operation status is as follows:

Normal Operation Status

  • When instance inventory is sufficient and your bid is higher than or equal to the current market price, Spot Instances will continue to run normally
  • You can continuously use instances for business deployment and manually release instances after business completion

Interruption and Reclamation Status

  • When instance inventory is insufficient or your bid is lower than the current market price, the system will trigger the instance interruption mechanism
  • The system will send notifications about upcoming instance release through multiple channels such as internal messages, SMS, and email in advance
  • Within the specified time after the notification is sent, the system will automatically release the Spot Instance

Features and Impact

Product Features

  • Instance configuration changes are not supported
  • Billing method conversion is not supported

Interruption Impact

  • Instance resources will be directly destroyed
  • Mounted system disks will be destroyed together
  • Mounted data disks will be automatically unmounted, preserving data
  • Bound elastic public IPs will be automatically unbound
  • Please ensure important data is backed up in advance

Billing Rules
Spot Instance prices change in real-time with market supply and demand. For specific billing rules, please refer to the Spot Instance Billing.

Application Scenarios

Spot Instances are suitable for stateless, fault-tolerant application scenarios, such as:

  • Real-time analysis business
  • Big data analysis business
  • Geospatial survey and analysis business
  • Image and media encoding business
  • Scientific computing business
  • Elastic scalable business sites and web crawling business
  • Testing business

The stronger the distribution, scalability, and fault tolerance of applications, the more suitable they are for using Spot Instances to save costs and improve throughput.