A history-based model for provisioning EC2 spot instances with cost constraints

Abstract

The increasing demand of computing resources has boosted the use of cloud computing providers. This has raised a new dimension in which the connection between resource usage and costs has to be considered from an organizational perspective. As a part of its EC2 service, Amazon introduced spot instances (SIs) as a cheap public infrastructure, but at the price of not ensuring reliability of the service (hired SIs can be terminated by the service when necessary). The interface for managing SIs is based on a bidding strategy that depends on nonpublic Amazon pricing strategies, which makes complicated for users to apply any scheduling or resource provisioning strategy based on such (cheaper) resources. Although it is believed that the use of the EC2 SIs infrastructure can reduce costs for final users, a deep review of literature concludes that their characteristics and possibilities have not yet been deeply explored. In this work we present and evaluate a framework for the analysis of the EC2 SIs infrastructure that uses the price history of such resources in order to generate a provisioning plan by means of a simulation algorithm considering cost constraints.