Discounted Azure VMs that can be taken back at short notice. Classic compute keeps the driver on-demand and uses spot for further nodes; if a spot worker is evicted, a spot replacement is tried before an on-demand one.
Also called Azure Spot VMs.
Read more: Microsoft Learn
In the Ultra Transcenders books
Each book explains Spot instances in context, with comparison tables and the common traps.
Terms in this definition
- Virtual machines
Infrastructure-as-a-service compute giving complete control of the operating system, making it a fit for lift-and-shift moves and for software relying on OS-level pieces like COM.
- Classic compute
All-purpose, jobs and pipeline compute running in your own Azure subscription, which you set up and manage yourself. Its counterpart is serverless compute, which Azure Databricks runs for you.
- Worker
A classic compute node hosting a Spark executor that carries out distributed work; with one executor on each worker the two words are used as synonyms. Worker node type sets its instance family, and Spark commands fail if there are no workers.