Title: Discussion 11 — Is Spot Worth the Risk?
Course: AIINFRA 101: Applied Infrastructure & Containerization > Section: Week 11 — Cloud Compute & Storage: GPU Instances, Spot, Object Storage

💬 Discussion 11 — Is Spot Worth the Risk? (20 pts)

Picture this: a GPU training job runs for three hours, racking up roughly \$50 in compute, and then gets interrupted mid-epoch by a Spot reclamation. Because checkpointing wasn't configured, all three hours of progress are lost. Post your response to these questions:

- Was Spot the right pricing choice for this workload in the first place? Why or why not?
- What would you have needed to put in place (checkpointing strategy, instance family choice, monitoring, or even where checkpoints are stored) to make Spot a safe choice here?
- At what point does a workload's cost, duration, or importance justify paying more for On-Demand or Reserved pricing instead of chasing the Spot discount?

Support your answer with at least one specific idea from the lecture (hypervisor oversubscription, checkpoint frequency tradeoffs, the EBS storage trap, or the Spot Instance Advisor). Then respond to at least two classmates — ideally engaging with someone who reached a different conclusion than you did.