IFO4
Loading...A unit of cloud compute capacity made available at a discount in exchange for the provider's right to reclaim the capacity on short notice. Spot capacity is suitable only for workloads tolerant to interruption: batch processing, fault-tolerant analytics, training pipelines with checkpointing, and stateless burst capacity. The federation does not endorse spot capacity for production user-facing workloads without a documented graceful-degradation path. Use of spot capacity for synchronous customer-facing traffic without such a path is a control finding under TGS-002:1.7.
Introduced by Amazon Web Services in 2009 alongside the reserved instance; the spot pricing concept derives from electricity and commodity spot markets.
Federation members operating spot fleets must publish an interruption-rate series and a graceful-degradation runbook. Spot usage in excess of fifteen percent of total compute without these controls is reported as a finding under UFMS-001:2.4.
@misc{ifo4_glossary_spot_instance,
title = {{Spot Instance}},
author = {{IFO4 Federation Editorial Board}},
howpublished = {{IFO4 Federation Glossary, slug \texttt{spot-instance}}},
year = {2026},
url = {https://ifo4.org/glossary/spot-instance},
note = {Category: FinOps; key: SpotInstance}
}Federation members and accredited practitioners may challenge any entry under TGS-002:1.7. Filed challenges are routed to the editorial board, triaged into the revision register, and resolved in writing on the public docket. The slug remains stable through any revision.