EC2 Spot Instances vs. Containers

EC2 is the jelly to Autoscaling's Peanut

Yesterday, we reviewed EC2 Auto Scaling and how it's like the "jelly to the peanut butter" when paired with Spot Instances. From a financial perspective, Spot Instances are similar to how we would use containers or even Lambda. The difference is that if we issue a container or Lambda instance, that instance fulfills to completion as long as we don't have any coding or other errors. On the other hand, Spot Instances uses the unused capacity within the AWS region to run an EC2 instance, which means we can easily survive failures. For example, if we're running a process and it fails or stops in the middle of that process, a Spot Instance can handle it. Additionally, Spot Instances are much more cost-effective, allowing us to save up to 90% on EC2 instances, which is a fantastic advantage. It also goes exceptionally well with Auto Scaling because we can use Auto Scaling policies to implement them well.