Amazon EC2 Spot Features

Spot instances can be launched via RunInstances API with a single additional parameter. The Spot instances launched via RunInstances are the same as any EC2 Spot instance; they provide the reliability, security, performance, control, and elasticity of Amazon EC2, at low market-driven prices. Simply specify the market option as Spot when requesting the capacity. Learn more about launching Spot instances via RunInstances API.

Spot Fleet allows you to automatically request Spot instances with the lowest price per unit of capacity. Simply submit a Spot Fleet request that includes the instance types that your application can use, and define a target capacity based on your application needs (in any unit including instances, vCPUs, memory, storage, or network throughput). Learn more about Spot Fleets.

Spot Fleets detect disrupted or manually terminated instances, and automatically replace them, to ensure that your application gets your desired amount of compute capacity. Spot Fleets also enable you to provision Spot capacity across multiple instance pools, which helps improve your application's availability and reduce operating costs of the Fleet over time.

With Spot instances, you never pay more than the maximum price you specified. If the Spot price exceeds your maximum willingness to pay for a given instance or when capacity is no longer available, your instance will be terminated automatically (or stopped, if you opt for this behavior on persistent request). Spot offers three features to help you better track and control when Spot instances run and terminate (or stop).

Amazon Web Services customers have the ability to run Amazon Elastic MapReduce (EMR) clusters on Spot instances and significantly reduce the cost of processing vast amounts of data on managed Hadoop clusters. Customers can run their EMR clusters by easily mixing Spot instances with On-Demand and/or Reserved instances using the multiple Instance Groups feature. To learn more about setting up an EMR cluster with Spot, visit the Amazon EC2 User Guide.

Amazon Cloudformation makes it easy to organize and deploy a collection of Amazon Web Services resources, including EC2 Spot, and lets you describe any dependencies or special parameters to pass in at runtime. For a sample High Performance Computing framework using CloudFormation that can use Spot instances, see the cfncluster demo. To learn more about setting up CloudFormation with Spot, visit the Amazon EC2 User Guide.

You can use Auto Scaling groups to launch and manage Spot instances, maintain application availability, and scale your Amazon EC2 Spot capacity up or down automatically according to conditions you define. To learn more about using Auto Scaling with Spot instances, visit the Auto Scaling Developer Guide.

You can specify an unencrypted snapshot at launch and request Spot to create an encrypted EBS volume(s) when launching the instance. Specify "Encrypted: true" as the encryption behavior within block device mappings, when submitting a Spot request. If you already have an encrypted EBS volume in use then specify the snapshot ID without the "Encrypted" flag and Spot will continue to create encrypted volumes in your existing encrypted EBS snapshot.

When you request a Spot instance, Spot will default the maximum price you are willing to pay per Spot instance-hour as the On-Demand price. You can also exercise additional control over your Spot instance budget by specifying the maximum price you are willing to pay per instance-hour in your request. You will continue to pay the Spot price that's in effect for the time period your instances are running. If Spot price rises above your maximum price, your instance will be automatically terminated or stopped. Learn more about how Spot works.