Title
Deconstructing the 2017 Changes to AWS Spot Market Pricing
Abstract
The Amazon Web Services spot market sells excess computing capacity at a reduced price and with reduced reliability guarantees. The low cost nature of the spot market has led to widespread adoption in industry and science. However, one of the challenges with using the spot market is that it is intentionally opaque and thus users have little understanding of the underlying dynamics. In late 2017, the mechanisms underlying the spot market were significantly altered-no longer are bid prices used to clear capacity and as a result the pricing is much less volatile. In this paper, we revisit prior work with the aim to analyze the differences in market dynamics between the pre-change and post-change spot instance market. We then use these analyses to highlight possible properties of the current and previous pricing algorithms, including artificial manipulation, dynamic algorithm adjustment, and persistent trends in market supply, demand, and pricing.
Year
DOI
Venue
2019
10.1145/3322795.3331465
Proceedings of the 10th Workshop on Scientific Cloud Computing
Keywords
DocType
ISBN
AWS, cloud pricing, spot market
Conference
978-1-4503-6758-5
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
2
0.36
0
Authors
7
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Matt Baughman162.80
Simon Caton215916.20
Christian Haas3191.74
Ryan Chard410512.60
Rich Wolski54126429.97
Foster Ian6229382663.24
Kyle Chard751556.70