State of Spot 2026
The State of Spot 2026 is the inaugural annual report from Rackspace Spot, analyzing how hundreds of organizations run production Kubernetes workloads on spot instances. Based on data from tens of thousands of active workloads across hundreds of cloudspaces, the report surfaces key trends in workload distribution, GitOps adoption, database technology choices, operational maturity, and platform reliability. It is the first public data set of its kind drawn directly from a live auction-based spot market.
The findings challenge the assumption that spot instances are only suited for disposable or experimental workloads. With 51% of cloudspaces running stateful applications and 96.8% of active users running entirely on spot with no on-demand fallback, the report shows that production-grade workloads including databases, caching layers, and ML pipelines are running confidently on spot infrastructure. For engineering teams and FinOps leads evaluating spot for serious workloads, this report is a practical reference point.
