Cost-Effective Spot Instances Provisioning Using Features of Cloud Markets

Abstract

Cloud computing offers a variable-cost payment scheme that allows cloud customers to specify the price they are willing to pay for renting spot instances at much lower costs than fixed payment schemes, and depending on the varying demand from cloud customers, cloud platforms could revoke spot instances at any time. To alleviate the effect of spot instance revocations, applications often employ different fault-tolerance mechanisms to minimize or even eliminate the lost work for each spot instance revocation. However, these fault-tolerance mechanisms incur additional overhead related to application completion time and deployment cost. This article proposes a novel cloud market-based approach for provisioning spot instances using features of cloud markets to reduce the deployment cost and completion time of applications. The simulation results show that the approach reduces the deployment cost and completion time compared to approaches based on fault-tolerance mechanisms.