Deconstructing Amazon EC2 Spot Instance Pricing

Ben-Yehuda, Orna Agmon; Ben-Yehuda, Muli; Schuster, Assaf; Tsafrir, Dan

doi:10.1109/cloudcom.2011.48

Cited by 163 publications

(166 citation statements)

References 9 publications

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“…However, since Amazon reveals no detailed pricing information, it remains unclear how the spot price is determined. Despite Amazon's claim that the price is calculated based on market demand and supply [1], some recent works conjecture that the price is in fact artificially set via some random process [9], [12]. In this paper, we consider periodic uniform-price auctions, as they share similar pricing forms as the EC2 spot market.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Towards Optimal Capacity Segmentation with Hybrid Cloud Pricing

Wang

Liang

2012

2012 IEEE 32nd International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems

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Abstract-Cloud resources are usually priced in multiple markets with different service guarantees. For example, Amazon EC2 prices virtual instances under three pricing schemes -the subscription option (a.k.a., Reserved Instances), the pay-as-yougo offer (a.k.a., On-Demand Instances), and an auction-like spot market (a.k.a., Spot Instances) -simultaneously. There arises a new problem of capacity segmentation: how can a provider allocate resources to different categories of pricing schemes, so that the total revenue is maximized? In this paper, we consider an EC2-like pricing scheme with traditional pay-as-you-go pricing augmented by an auction market, where bidders periodically bid for resources and can use the instances for as long as they wish, until the clearing price exceeds their bids. We show that optimal periodic auctions must follow the design of m+1-price auction with seller's reservation price. Theoretical analysis also suggests the connections between periodic auctions and EC2 spot market. Furthermore, we formulate the optimal capacity segmentation strategy as a Markov decision process over some demand prediction window. To mitigate the high computational complexity of the conventional dynamic programming solution, we develop a near-optimal solution that has significantly lower complexity and is shown to asymptotically approach the optimal revenue.

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Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Towards Optimal Capacity Segmentation with Hybrid Cloud Pricing

Wang

Liang

2012

2012 IEEE 32nd International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems

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“…However, other authors found that the spot price variation in Amazon EC2 over time does not seem to follow any particular law [24]. It has also been observed in [25] that Amazon may be artificially intervening in the prices by setting a reserve price and generating prices at random, thus complicating even more the prediction of spot price variations.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 95%

Self-managed cost-efficient virtual elastic clusters on hybrid Cloud infrastructures

Calatrava

Romero

Moltó

et al. 2016

Future Generation Computer Systems

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This paper describes the developments to produce EC3 (Elastic Cloud Computing Cluster), a tool that creates self-managed cost-efficient virtual hybrid elastic clusters on top of Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) Clouds. Using spot instances, together with checkpointing techniques, EC3 can significantly reduce the total cost of executions while introducing automatic fault tolerance. Moreover, EC3 can deploy and manage hybrid clusters across on-premises and public Cloud resources, thus introducing Cloud bursting capabilities.A case study is presented to assess the effectiveness of the tool featuring the structural dynamic analysis of buildings. In addition, checkpointing algorithms are evaluated in a real Cloud environment with existing workloads to study their effectiveness. The results show the feasibility and benefits of this type of clusters for computationally intensive applications.

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“…Such an interesting result is only at a first glance surprising and stems from a sort of emergent behavior of the community, homogeneous and willing to minimize its regret. This situation motivates quite easily why a market-driven strategy could turn to be unprofitable for an IaaS provider and why, indeed, Amazon EC2 does not apply it [11].…”

Section: A Community and Market-driven Approachmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…An interesting reverse engineering analysis of the price of Amazon EC2 spot instances was conducted by Ben-Yehuda et al [11]. By analyzing the spot price history, they built a model generating prices consistent with existing price traces.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Bidding Strategies in QoS-Aware Cloud Systems Based on N-Armed Bandit Problems

Abundo

Valerio

Cardellini

et al. 2014

2014 IEEE 3rd Symposium on Network Cloud Computing and Applications (Ncca 2014)

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Abstract-In this paper we consider a set of Software as a Service (SaaS) providers, that offer a set of Web services using the Cloud facilities provided by an Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) provider. We assume that the IaaS provider offers a pay only what you use scheme similar to the Amazon EC2 service, comprising flat, on demand, and spot virtual machine instances. We propose a two-stage provisioning scheme. In the first stage, the SaaS providers determine the number of required flat and on demand instances by means of standard optimization techniques. In the second stage, the SaaS providers compete by bidding for the spot instances which are instantiated using the unused IaaS capacity. We put our focus on the bidding decision process by the SaaS providers, which takes place during the second stage, and apply N-armed bandit problems, in which the player is faced repeatedly with a choice among N different options, and every time he submits his decision evaluating past feedbacks. Through numerical experiments, we analyze proposed strategies under different scenarios and prove the SaaS providers ability to refine their behavior round by round and to determine the best bid so to maximize their revenue and achieve as many spot resources as possible, also addressing the importance of a trade-off between exploration and exploitation, i.e., among greedy and non-greedy actions.

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Deconstructing Amazon EC2 Spot Instance Pricing

Cited by 163 publications

References 9 publications

Towards Optimal Capacity Segmentation with Hybrid Cloud Pricing

Towards Optimal Capacity Segmentation with Hybrid Cloud Pricing

Self-managed cost-efficient virtual elastic clusters on hybrid Cloud infrastructures

Bidding Strategies in QoS-Aware Cloud Systems Based on N-Armed Bandit Problems

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