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In this article:

  • Limitations
  • Working with preemptible VMs
  • Use cases
  1. Concepts
  2. Virtual machines
  3. Preemptible VMs

Preemptible VMs

Written by
Yandex Cloud
Updated at April 18, 2025
  • Limitations
  • Working with preemptible VMs
  • Use cases

Preemptible VMs are VM instances that may be forcibly stopped at any time. This can happen in these two cases:

  • If 24 hours elapsed since the VM was started.
  • If there is a lack of resources to launch a regular VM in the same availability zone. Such an event is usually unlikely, but this may vary day to day.

Preemptible VMs are available at a lower price than regular ones. However, they do not provide fault-tolerance.

You can create a preemptible VM or change the type of an existing one.

This will change pricing for the VM instance. For more information, see our pricing policy.

LimitationsLimitations

In addition to the fact that preemptible VMs can be forcibly stopped, they have the following limitations:

  • If there are not enough resources in the specified availability zone to launch a preemptible VM, it will not get launched.
  • Preemptible VMs are not subject to the SLA.

Working with preemptible VMsWorking with preemptible VMs

When a preemptible VM is stopped, it is not deleted and all its data is saved. When you need the VM again, you can just start it.

With the Yandex Cloud Functions function, you can configure a stopped preemptible VM to run automatically.

Note

In Instance Groups, stopped VMs start automatically based on the autohealing feature.

With Instance Groups, preemptible VMs in the group get stopped after a random interval of 22 to 24 hours, rather than exactly after 24 hours. This helps avoid situations when all VMs in the group restart at the same time and stop handling the load of running applications.

Use casesUse cases

  • Deploying a fault-tolerant architecture with preemptible VMs
  • High-performance computing (HPC) on preemptible VMs

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