What is Spot Instance?
Unused cloud capacity offered at up to 90% discount that can be reclaimed with 2-minute notice.
Spot Instances (AWS) or Preemptible VMs (GCP) are unused compute capacity available at up to 90% discount. The catch: the cloud provider can reclaim them with a 2-minute warning when capacity is needed. Spot instances are ideal for fault-tolerant, stateless workloads — batch jobs, CI/CD runners, and scale-out application tiers. In Kubernetes, Karpenter handles Spot instance interruptions gracefully by draining nodes and rescheduling pods.
More Cloud Terms
ECR (Elastic Container Registry)
AWS's fully managed container image registry service.
EKS (Elastic Kubernetes Service)
AWS's managed Kubernetes service that runs the K8s control plane for you.
Fargate
AWS serverless compute engine for containers — no node management required.
IAM (Identity and Access Management)
AWS service for managing user identities and permissions for cloud resources.
IRSA (IAM Roles for Service Accounts)
EKS feature that allows Kubernetes pods to assume AWS IAM roles without node-level credentials.
VPC (Virtual Private Cloud)
A logically isolated network in the cloud where you launch your cloud resources.
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