Saving money using Amazon EC2 Spot Instances to execute EMR job flows

Amazon EC2 Spot Instances allow us to purchase underutilized EC2 compute resources at a significant discount. The prices of Spot Instances change depending on the demand. We can submit bids for the Spot Instances and we receive the requested compute instances if our bid exceeds the current Spot Instance price. Amazon bills these instances based on the actual Spot Instance price, which can be lower than your bid. Amazon will terminate your instances, if the Spot Instance price exceeds your bid. However, Amazon does not charge for partial Spot Instance hours if Amazon terminated your instances. You can find more information on Amazon EC2 Spot Instances at http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/spot-instances/.

Amazon EMR supports using Spot Instances both as master as well as worker compute instances. Spot Instances are ideal to execute nontime critical computations such as batch jobs.