Comment by topher200
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
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.