I have a preempt-able workload for which I could use Spot instances or Savings Plans.

Does anyone have experience running Spot in 2025? If you were to start over, would you keep using Spot?

  - I observe with pricing that Spot is cheaper
  - I am running on three different architectures, which should limit Spot unavailability
  - I've been running about 50 Spot EC2 instances for a month without issue. I'm debating turning it on for many more instances

▲ erulabs 5 days ago | parent [-]

In terms of cost, from cheapest to most expensive:

1. Spot with autoscaling to adjust to demand and a savings plan that covers the ~75th percentile scale

2. On-demand with RIs (RIs will definitely die some day)

3. On-demand with savings-plans (More flexible but more expensive than RIs)

3. Spot

4. On-demand

I definitely recommend spot instances. If you're greenfielding a new service and you're not tied to AWS, some other providers have hilariously cheap spot markets - see http://spot.rackspace.com/. If you're using AWS, definitely auto-scaling spot with savings plans are the way to go. If you're using Kubernetes, the AWS Karpenter project (https://karpenter.sh/) has mechanisms for determining the cheapest spot price among a set of requirements.

Overall tho, in my experience, ec2 is always pretty far down the list of AWS costs. S3, RDS, Redshift, etc wind up being a bigger bill in almost all past-early-stage startups.

▲

mdaniel 5 days ago | parent [-]

To "me, too" this, it's not like that AWS spot instance just go "poof," they do actually warn you (my recollection is 60s in advance of the TerminateInstance call), and so a resiliency plane on top of the workloads (such as the cited Kubernetes) can make that a decided "non-event". Shout out to the reverse uptime crew, a subset of Chaos Engineering

	▲	cptnntsoobv 5 days ago \| parent [-]
		The spot termination warnings arrive 120 seconds before termination https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/spot-ins...