Cut Up to 90% Cloud Costs with Alibaba Cloud PAI‑EAS Spot Instances

In the drive for efficiency in AI development and services, Alibaba Cloud’s Machine Learning platform PAI announces support for Spot Instances . During model inference, users can select Spot Instances via the PAI‑EAS online service platform for tasks that are less sensitive to latency, achieving up to 90% cost optimization compared with pay‑as‑you‑go instances.

What is a Spot Instance

A Spot Instance is a purchasing model for compute resources whose price fluctuates in real time based on market demand and supply. PAI‑EAS Spot Instances draw from idle resources in the public resource pool, offering prices as low as 10% of the pay‑as‑you‑go rate.

Unprotected Spot < Spot with protection < Prepaid < Pay‑as‑you‑go

Before using Spot Instances, users set a maximum bid price and optionally a 1‑hour protection period. Once the service is deployed, PAI‑EAS automatically bids for the appropriate resources.

Spot Instance Usage Steps

Purchase Spot Instance: success requires sufficient inventory and a bid not lower than the current market price.

Use Spot Instance: with a 1‑hour protection period, the instance is guaranteed for at least one hour even if the market price exceeds the bid; after the hour, the instance may be released if inventory is insufficient or the bid is too low. Without protection, the instance is released immediately under those conditions.

Multi‑spec Instance Selection: when deploying with Spot Instances, PAI‑EAS can iterate through a list of specifications to launch resources, greatly reducing deployment risk caused by Spot Instance release.

Applicable Scenarios

Spot Instances are suitable for price‑sensitive but latency‑tolerant workloads, such as:

AIGC asynchronous generation

Image recognition, OCR batch processing

Video segmentation, classification batch processing

Speech segmentation and transcription batch processing

Stable Diffusion and other AI painting batch jobs

When real‑time inference results are not required and a delay of up to an hour is acceptable, Spot Instances can significantly lower service costs.

Configuration Guide

Open the PAI‑EAS console and click “Deploy Service”.

In the “Resource Deployment” section, select “Public Resource Group” and switch to “Advanced Resource Configuration” to set Spot Instance resources.

Choose a protection period:

1‑hour protection: guarantees at least one hour of usage after successful acquisition.

No fixed protection: no guarantee, but cheaper pricing.

Select the machine type; the interface shows Spot and original prices for comparison. Add instance specifications with the “+” button; PAI‑EAS will traverse the spec list to launch resources, mitigating release risk.

Complete other basic settings and click “Deploy”.

References

EAS Spot Instance Overview

Advanced Configuration: Multi‑Spec Instance Selection