AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner (CLF-C02)Billing, Pricing, and SupportMedium
A gaming company runs short-lived batch rendering jobs that can be interrupted without major impact and wants to minimize EC2 compute costs for this workload. Which pricing model should the company choose?
- ASpot Instances
- BDedicated Hosts
- COn-Demand Instances
- DReserved Instances
Show answer & explanationAnswer & explanation
Correct answer: A. Spot Instances
Spot Instances let customers use spare EC2 capacity at up to a 90% discount compared to On-Demand, making them ideal for fault-tolerant, interruptible workloads like batch rendering. AWS can reclaim Spot capacity with a two-minute warning, which is acceptable for this workload.
Why the other options are wrong
- B. Dedicated Hosts are for licensing/compliance needs, not cost optimization of interruptible jobs.
- C. On-Demand has no discount and is meant for unpredictable, non-interruptible workloads.
- D. Reserved Instances require a commitment and are best for steady-state workloads, not short bursts.
Spot Instances
EC2 pricing model that uses spare AWS capacity at steep discounts, suitable for flexible, interruptible workloads.
- Up to 90% cheaper than On-Demand
- AWS can reclaim capacity with a 2-minute warning
- Best for batch jobs, CI/CD, stateless web servers
Memory trick: Spot = spare & spontaneous savings