

Ask HN: Who uses AWS spot instances? - Patrick_Devine

Which companies are using spot instances, and what are they using them for?  Off the top of my head I can think of Netflix, but most companies haven&#x27;t created their architecture to be that resilient.
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aioprisan
We use it extensively at my old shop, Optaros, where I worked on quite a bit
of that strategy. The VP of Operations spoke at AWS re:invent this year on how
we use spot instances to massively cut down on costs:
[https://portal.reinvent.awsevents.com/connect/speakerDetail....](https://portal.reinvent.awsevents.com/connect/speakerDetail.ww?PERSON_ID=95ECE4D3EA767BA29578145B7AEA801D)

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Patrick_Devine
I'm wondering whether I should have asked the question "Why are people _not_
using AWS spot instances?". It seems like the price savings alone should be
enough for people to consider using them. Is the architecture too different
where it makes deployment prohibitively difficult?

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lgieron
We use it for ML-related tasks: transforming data, training models - stuff
that are CPU-intensive and can occasionally fail.

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toomuchtodo
Scribd is using it for async document conversion.

