GCP has a similar instance type called "preemptible", they're not quite as cheap as spot, but they don't "dry up" and they're guaranteed to go down every 24 hours.

This precludes one from becoming complacent with spot instances that rarely go away.

https://cloud.google.com/kubernetes-engine/docs/how-to/preem... states that preemtible VMs aren't guaranteed to be available.

You're right. spot instances are a lot more stable than preemptible. we've seen spot instances that last a year for us.

This is the second response of this sort that I'm replying to.

"A lot more stable" isn't really a desirable characteristic of ephemeral compute capacity. In my experience, the less frequently the instances went away, the more complacent the operators became.

Preemptible instance are stable in the sense that you know they're going away within 24 hours and must be prepared for that.

true that.

spot used to be that way and the price was very sensitive. but AWS tweaked it so that it's more stable.

to the point, after a year or 2 of running spot instances, we don't feel the difference of spot and ondemand that much. we got complacent.

Yeah but Kubernetes "self-healing" a lot of times isn't. Or it just trips over itself (stuck pods, stuck cronjobs, etc).