Turning EC2 into a spot market, Amazon Monday started offering Spot Instances. Users will bid on unused Amazon capacity and run the instances as long as their bid exceeds the current Spot Price, which will fluctuate with supply and demand. Amazon said it was responding to user demand. It said Spot Instances are good with applications that have flexible start and stop times such as image and video conversion and rendering, data processing, financial modeling and analysis, web crawling and load testing.

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