Skip to content

Spot Price

The cluster administrators can significantly save costs by simplifying the use of AKS Spot Instances on Azure Clusters. Specifically, users are allowed to implement and codify a number of best practices associated with using Spot Instances such as diversification, automated interruption handling, and leveraging Auto Scaling groups to acquire capacity.

Overview

Spot Instance Price are spare Azure capacity that are offered at significantly lower costs compared to On-Demand instances. Spot capacity is split into pools determined by instance type, Availability Zone (AZ), and AKS Region.

Spot Instance pricing can change based on supply and demand of a particular Spot capacity pool. A Spot instance pool is a set of unused Azure instances with the same instance type (e.g. m5.xlarge), operating system and AZ.

Spot Instances can be available at up to a 90% discount. Azure publishes a "Spot Instance Advisor" where they publish spot instance policies, limitations and pricing for various instance types. An illustrative example shown below.

Spot Instance Advisor

Spot Instance Price

To use Spot Instance Price, enable the check-box Enable Spot Price in the Node Group configuration

Users can set a Spot Max Price in scenarios where they want to set maximum budget

Spot Instance Advisor

Note: Regardless of Max Price, spot instances will still be charged at the current spot market price