A media company needs to run a nightly video transcoding job that can tolerate interruptions and restarts. The finance team wants the lowest possible EC2 compute cost. Which purchasing option best fits this workload?
- On-Demand Instances
- Spot Instances
- Dedicated Hosts
- A zonal Reserved Instance
Correct answer: B. Spot Instances
Spot Instances offer the deepest discounts on EC2 compute, commonly up to around 90% versus On-Demand pricing, in exchange for the possibility that AWS reclaims the capacity with a two-minute warning. A transcoding job that is fault tolerant and restartable is the textbook Spot workload: an interruption costs only a retry, not lost data. On-Demand is flexible but the most expensive of the sensible options here. Reserved Instances reward steady, predictable usage over one or three years, not a nightly batch job. Dedicated Hosts exist for licensing and compliance needs and carry premium pricing, solving a problem this company does not have.
Source: AWS EC2 docs: Instance purchasing options — Spot Instances