Reduce Cloud Costs with Auction Driven Pricing: Rackspace Spot

Compare the top 10 Kubernetes cost optimization tools for 2026, including Rackspace Spot, CAST AI, Kubecost, and more. See how each platform handles cost visibility, workload rightsizing, and infrastructure savings to help your team reduce cloud spend by up to 90%.

Compare the 10 best managed Kubernetes providers for 2026. See pricing, features, setup complexity, and vendor lock-in risks to find the right fit for your team.

Discover how organizations are adopting Kubernetes spot instances on Rackspace Spot for production workloads in 2026.

Spot instance pricing works in two fundamentally different ways: auction-based markets where buyers determine the price, and provider-controlled pricing where the discount ceiling is set for you. This article breaks down how each model works, where provider-controlled pricing falls short, and why the auction model consistently delivers deeper savings for teams running production workloads.

This article explores what actually happens when Apache Airflow runs on spot instances, using real experiments to simulate node preemption across both control plane and worker nodes. It walks through how tasks recover using retries, how S3 enables checkpointing without rerunning previous steps, and how to handle partial outputs through validation strategies like success markers. It also highlights the limitations of this approach, particularly around the Airflow metadata database, and outlines the architectural patterns required to build a fault-tolerant Airflow system on interruptible infrastructure.

Running Apache Airflow entirely on Spot instances isn’t the standard approach most teams take, but we decided to try something different on Kubernetes. Using Rackspace Spot’s auction-based market with lower preemption risk, this guide shows how an all-Spot setup can be both cost-efficient and practical to run.

We're excited to announce availability of Rook/Ceph as our next-generation Container Storage Interface (CSI) provider in Spot. A new StorageClass, ‘spot-ceph’ is now available in Spot’s IAD and ORD data-centers. Specifying this storage class when using PVCs will use the ceph-csi driver to mount your persistent volumes on managed Ceph clusters in Spot.

Discover Rackspace Spot's low-cost managed database service using PostgreSQL. Enjoy high availability, automatic provisioning, and cloud-native architecture.