Finance Wants Everything on Spot Instances. Including the Database.
Finance wants the whole fleet, primary database included, moved to spot instances for 70 percent savings. Defend what actually belongs on spot and what a reclaimed primary really costs.
the decision you defend
Finance has mandated a cloud cost cut and points at spot instances: 70 percent cheaper, and 'the cloud provider says interruptions are rare'. They want everything moved, including the primary Postgres server. Do you push back, and where do you draw the line? Defend your call.
the situation
After a rough quarter, finance mandates a 40 percent cut to the cloud bill and circulates a consultant's slide: "spot instances, up to 70 percent off, interruptions under 5 percent". The CTO forwards it with "let's do this everywhere". "Everywhere" includes the web tier, CI runners, async workers, and the primary Postgres instance with its two read replicas.
context
The stack runs on AWS: about 40 on-demand EC2 instances, most of the bill in the web/worker fleets and the databases. Postgres replicates asynchronously to the replicas, typically 1-3 seconds behind, with nightly snapshots. The web tier sits behind an ALB but has no spot interruption handling today, and the worker jobs are not checkpointed. In the planning meeting the platform lead says: "an interruption is basically a reboot, and we survive reboots. I say we flip the whole account to spot and bank the savings."
How this challenge works
Take a position on the decision above and defend it. A senior-engineer AI will push back over up to 4 rounds. When you are done, you are scored against a verified rubric so you can see exactly what a complete answer covers - these are learning prompts, not gotchas.