Systems and methods are provided for managing and/or executing cloud compute instances that may be pre-empted by their providers, known in at least one provider as “spot instances”. Various aspects manage early termination (i.e., before customer deallocation or compute task completion) of spot instances, enabling improved utilization, and increasing reliability of executing tasks on spot instances. In some embodiments, systems and/or methods are provided for prediction of when spot instance kills are likely to occur. These systems and/or methods can gracefully handle spot kills issued by Providers (e.g., trigger preservation operations), trigger transitions to spot instances at another Provider, trigger increased bidding to preserve current spot instances, and/or trigger a premium payment to allow for execution of preservation operations, among other options. Other embodiments enable customers to directly manage instance kill operations (e.g., a customer or a customer's program selects instances to terminate via a UI or API, etc.).