Agreed. But that was also my point - it depends on your application.
Aside from that though, spot instances aren't that volatile. I have some that have been running for months. Obviously they're not always at the low low price they can be, but if you average it out, they're not much higher than that.
In total honesty, I don't use those machines I mentioned. I use ones with 32gb ram and much better CPU performance. I need that ram for what I'm doing and any other provider I've found comes in a lot more expensive to satisfy that requirement. The CPU I get is good enough for what I'm doing.
But again, I don't know anyone other than Amazon that has an infrastructure that flexible at that price.
To me AWS still suffers from the same problem that most others do - their pricing is based around fixed allocations of everything (i.e. CPU, RAM, local disk space) - what if you want lots of RAM but don't need lots of disk space? Or Vice versa.
Aside from that though, spot instances aren't that volatile. I have some that have been running for months. Obviously they're not always at the low low price they can be, but if you average it out, they're not much higher than that.
In total honesty, I don't use those machines I mentioned. I use ones with 32gb ram and much better CPU performance. I need that ram for what I'm doing and any other provider I've found comes in a lot more expensive to satisfy that requirement. The CPU I get is good enough for what I'm doing.
But again, I don't know anyone other than Amazon that has an infrastructure that flexible at that price.