I have published an InfoQ news post about the AWS team's efforts to widen applicable use cases for its low-cost EC2 instance pool:
Amazon EC2 recently gained two-minute warnings before Spot Instances are reclaimed, a feature "formally known as a Spot Instance Termination Notice". The goal is to "allow more types of applications to benefit from the scale and low price of Spot Instances" by giving them time to save state, upload log files, or deregister from other components such as load balancers or cluster managers.
[...]
Continue reading the full post in Amazon EC2 Gains Two-Minute Warning for Spot Instance Termination.