I have published an InfoQ news post about the AWS team's efforts to ease usage of and widen applicable use cases for its low-cost EC2 compute capacity pool:
Amazon Web Services (AWS) recently introduced significant changes on how to request and operate Amazon EC2 spot instances, which can provide considerable cost savings. Users can now request spot instances without specifying a bidding price, spot prices are adjusted more gradually, and spot instances can also be stopped or hibernated and later resumed to further optimize interruptible workloads.
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Continue reading the full post in AWS Streamlines Amazon EC2 Spot Instance Pricing Model and Operational Complexity.