Open question to the community: • AWS is complex, I understand it has a lot of moving parts and possibilities. But why not use something simpler like www.vultr.com and save on the overhead?

AWS only has as much overhead as you use of it. There are lots of VPS solutions out there, some cheaper than AWS if all you want is a VPS. That concept and service has been around for decades. Where AWS becomes relevant is when you want to do other things as well/instead.

Also AWS spot is cheaper than vultr and other VPSes. Even if you move some of workload to spot, the cost difference becomes less important.

@Ryan Alder Agreed on that. @Ravi Kapoor Isn't spot severely limited? I believe it encourages using other AWS resources which have higher fees. Correct me if I'm wrong.

It can be recalled with 2 minute notice, but there are ways to work around that issue, it also depends on your use case.

You don't have to use services other than ec2, to use ec2 spot instances.

Use case for spot EC2 -> CI/CD pipelines on-demand Jenkins EC2 plugin can do it 😁 For Tekton Pipelines (Kubernetes) it may be an autoscaller basing on node selector.

That's a great usecase @Damian Keska. Can spot instances host a docker container?

Sure they can, why not 🙂 It's just a full virtual machine with root access and it's own kernel.

You càn run fargate using spot instances

If you need computing, dedicated servers would be cheaper, but the value of cloud solutions is on the service catalog. Nobody wants to set up high availability, custom software installs, logging, pipelines and backup for every new idea to test or deployment.