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:

1. Reduced cost: Up to 70% reduced prices vs standard containers
2. Increased flexibility: Only pay for the time your container runs
3. 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.