Embracing failures and cutting infrastructure costs: Spot instances in Kubernetes

Spot Instances are unused servers that are available for less than the regular price. Therefore, you can significantly save on your infrastructure costs. It does come with a price, though.

Your cloud provider can take away your spot instance at any time, and give to another client who has requested it at a standard cost. How can you save money, but work around disappearing servers? Learn how you can leverage Kubernetes to self-heal your infrastructure and cut costs with Spot Instances.

The last decades have seen a global shift from on-premise data centres to the provisioning of Virtual Machines (VMs) from mainstream cloud providers such as Amazon Web Services, Azure, Google Cloud Platform. Running and managing your own physical machines is hard and costly; chances are you’ll never be as successful and efficient as any of the top cloud providers. And what’s not to love when you can leverage a mature platform and features such as: In this article, we will explore the different pricing models of a typical cloud provider.

We will focus on one strategy and see how it could cut your bill by up to 80% if you are willing to trade in reliability. Finally, we will see how Kubernetes makes that lack of reliability irrelevant and allows you to run a cheap yet highly available cluster. The typical pricing model for cloud providers is based on a pay-as-you-go scheme.

Compute resources come in different sizes (i.e. memory, CPU, disk etc..) and an hourly cost. You get billed for the amount of time the instance is running.

Source: learnk8s.io