Spot VMs are highly affordable compute instances suitable for batch jobs and fault-tolerant workloads.

August 9, 2025 - This innovative tool is an interactive, global heat map that provides insights into the availability, reliability, and cost-efficiency of Spot instances across various regions and availability zones of AWS, Azure, and GCP.

March 25, 2021 - Spot instances are provisioned when there is available capacity for the specified instance type and AZ, and the bidding price is equal to or higher than the current auction price. The first step in this process is to create a spot instance request.

June 30, 2025 - As the scale of public cloud infrastructure increased to meet overall demands, providers sought a method to utilize spare Virtual Machine (VM) resources. In 2009, Amazon introduced Amazon EC2 Spot Instances, where customers bid on unused or underutilized capacity. Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and Microsoft Azure followed suit and offered the same feature, albeit advertised under different names.

June 6, 2025 - AWS may reclaim capacity with just a two-minute warning, after which the instance is stopped, hibernated, or terminated based on user settings. Google Cloud offers its users the opportunity to use Preemptible VMs and Spot VMs to lower their cloud resource costs by 60-91%. Both of these provisions offer discounted spare Compute Engine capacity in exchange for the possibility of interruption with very little notice.

This page describes Spot VMs: virtual machine (VM) instances that are excess Compute Engine capacity. Spot VMs have significant discounts, but Compute Engine might preemptively stop or delete (preempt) Spot VMs to reclaim the capacity at any time.

January 14, 2025 - You have to handle the automated rebuild of the instances to work properly. That’s why we will build a Managed Instance Group on GCP and an Autoscaling Group on AWS.

Batch processing: Preemptible VMs ... VMs are similar to Amazon Web Services’ (AWS) spot instances, which allow you to bid on spare compute capacity....

July 23, 2025 - Spot virtual computers are ideal ... as a "Spot VM," or "Spot Virtual Machine," is one that cloud service providers such as Google Cloud Platform (GCP), AWS, and Azure offer....

AWS also imposes limits on the number of running and requested spot instances per account in one region. To learn more and understand how to increase these limits if necessary, refer to the AWS documentation on spot limits. Google Cloud Platform offers Spot VMs with fixed pricing, subject to no more than once-a-month pricing changes. When using Spot VMs in GCP, you need to consider CPU, disk, and GPU quota requirements.

January 21, 2025 - Spot instances can offer savings of up to 90% when compared to regular on-demand instances. This is because cloud service providers would rather rent out their spare capacity at a lower price than let it remain idle.

October 15, 2021 - AWS has had this kind of spot instance for years, but with a 2 minute grace period rather than the 30 seconds GCP is offering. Azure and GCP both originally went with the 24-hour cutoff (which can easily be replicated on a regular spot instance if needed), but now GCP are backing off on that ...

GCP Spot VM: Introduction and how to use them

February 19, 2024 - Spot VMs are basically unused Compute Engine instance within a cloud provider datacenter that are available at a huge discount. Spot instances can reduce your Compute Engine usage costs by up to 91%. Though Spot VMs are available at substantially ...

Step 1. Open the Google Cloud Console and select the project in which you want to create a Spot VM. Step 2. Locate the Compute Engine page in the left navigation menu. Step 3. Click VM instances to open the VM instances page.

You can view the price history of Google Cloud Spot Instances for the last few years. Select the desired instance type, region, and time period to see a chart of price changes over time. This will help you understand pricing dynamics and make informed decisions when choosing resources.

GCP Spot VMs are compute instances that draw on the surplus capacity of Google Cloud’s global infrastructure, pricing the service at substantial markdowns relative to pay-per-use rates.