Announcing public preview of Azure Container Instances Spot containers
Today, we are excited to announce a preview of Azure Container Instances (ACI) Spot containers. ACI Spot containers offer an improved pricing plan for ACI by allowing you to take advantage of unused Azure compute capacity at a significantly lower cost. With ACI Spot containers, you can run interruptible, containerized workloads at up-to-70% discounted prices (vs standard containers on ACI) and are billed for per-second memory and core usage like standard ACI containers.
ACI Spot containers are well suited to short-lived, containerized workloads that tolerate Azure interruptions. Common scenarios include parallelizable offline workloads such as image rendering, genomic processing, Monte Carlo simulations, burst workloads at scale, and development or test workloads. ACI Spot containers offer the following benefits to our customers:
- Reduced cost: Up to 70% reduced prices vs standard containers
- Increased flexibility: Only pay for the time your container runs
- Easy to use: works seamlessly with the Azure CLI and Azure portal
The public preview of ACI Spot containers is now available in the following regions: West Europe, East US, and West US2. We encourage you to try out Spot Containers today and see the benefits for yourself.
Get started with Azure Container Instances (ACI) Spot containers
This feature is now available to all Azure customers! To learn more:
- Visit the Getting Started guide on Microsoft Docs.
- Learn more about pricing details for the Azure Container Instances pricing page.
Published on:
Learn moreRelated posts
Resiliency by Design: Azure Compute
Introducing langchain-azure-cosmosdb: Build Agentic Apps and RAG with One Database
Build AI Agents and RAG Applications with the New LangChain + LangGraph Connector for Azure Cosmos DB Building AI agents and RAG applications ...
Azure Developer CLI (azd) – April 2026
The Azure Developer CLI (azd) shipped five releases in April 2026. The biggest theme this month is multi-language hook support: write azd hook...
Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management – Run Planning Optimization on Azure operated by 21Vianet
We are announcing the ability for companies in China running Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management on Azure operated by 21Vianet to run Plannin...
Announcing the Private Preview of Cosmos DB Azure RBAC Integration
Introduction Managing access to Azure resources often means dealing with two separate permission models: one for management operations and ano...
Azure DocumentDB (with MongoDB compatibility) for Banking: A Modern Customer 360 Approach
Introduction: Transforming Customer Intelligence in Banking Every day, people interact with their bank across mobile apps, branches, call cent...
Exam AI-901: Microsoft Azure AI Fundamentals
With a massive amount of focus on AI across the Microsoft platform, I decided to sit the new AI-901 exam, which is the new Azure fundamentals ...
The problem: All-or-nothing batch processing in Azure Service Bus
Azure Functions lets you settle each Service Bus message on its own within a batch. Complete, abandon, dead-letter, or defer messages one by o...
Welcome to Azure Cosmos DB Conf 2026
Today is the day. Azure Cosmos DB Conf 2026, in partnership with AMD, is a free virtual developer event focused on building modern, scalable a...