AWS Certified SysOps Administrator – Associate (legacy) — Question 446

Spot instances are ideally designed for which purpose below?

Answer options

• A. Running database instances that can scale up and down based on a specific workload.
• B. Running long duration and highly transactional applications.
• C. For building distributed fault tolerant databases under a tight deadline.
• D. Taking advantage of excess EC2 capacity at prices below standard on-demand rates, for short duration jobs.

Correct answer: D

Explanation

EC2 Spot Instances allow customers to access spare Amazon EC2 capacity at steep discounts, making them ideal for flexible, stateless, or short-duration tasks that can tolerate interruptions. Because these instances can be reclaimed by AWS with a two-minute notice, they are unsuitable for critical, long-running transactional applications or database workloads that require continuous uptime.