Amazon Web Services allows you to bid for computing capacity (EC2 VMs). If your maximum bid is more than the current bid price, you keep your instance. If your maximum bid is less than the current bid price, then your VM is destroyed.
The advantage is that the bid prices are far cheaper than the usual on-demand price. 70-90% discounts are common.
Here's a quick example of bid vs. on-demand prices for some commonly-used AWS instance types in the us-east-1 (Northern Virginia) region:
- TO DO: Add table here
m3.medium - .23 c3.large - .12 r3.xlarge - 0.15 g2.2xlarge - .14