CLF-C02 Practice Question 40: Interruptible Workloads
AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner (CLF-C02) · Test 4 · question 10 of 10
A research lab runs genome-analysis batch jobs on Amazon EC2. The number of jobs changes a lot from week to week, the jobs have no deadline, and each job saves checkpoints so that it can resume if its instance is stopped partway through. Which EC2 purchasing option will run these jobs at the LOWEST cost?
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Answer:
Spot Instances use spare EC2 capacity at steep discounts compared with On-Demand prices. In return, EC2 can interrupt them with a two-minute warning when it needs the capacity back. AWS names batch jobs, data analysis and background processing as good fits, as long as you can be flexible about when the work runs and the application can tolerate interruption. Jobs with no deadline that checkpoint and resume meet both conditions.
Option A, On-Demand Instances, would never be interrupted, but the lab would pay full price for a guarantee it does not need. Option B, Reserved Instances, discount steady, predictable usage in exchange for a one-year or three-year commitment. With the number of jobs changing week to week, the lab would pay for reserved capacity it sometimes does not use, and the discount is still smaller than Spot's. Option C, Dedicated Instances, run on hardware dedicated to one customer. That serves isolation or compliance needs and costs *more* than shared On-Demand capacity.
Reference: Spot Instances