Paper Info
Title
The Price Is (Not) Right: Reflections on Pricing for Transient Cloud Servers
Abstract
Amazon introduced spot instances in December 2009, enabling "customers to bid on unused Amazon EC2 capacity and run those instances for as long as their bid exceeds the current Spot Price.'' Amazon's real-time computational spot market was novel in multiple respects. For example, it was the first (and to date only) large-scale public implementation of market-based resource allocation based on dynamic pricing after decades of research, and it provided users with useful information, control knobs, and options for optimizing the cost of running cloud applications. Spot instances also introduced the concept of transient cloud servers derived from variable idle capacity that cloud platforms could revoke at any time. Transient servers have since become central to efficient resource management of modern clusters and clouds. As a result, Amazon's spot market was the motivation for substantial research over the past decade. Yet, in November 2017, Amazon effectively ended its realtime spot market by announcing that users no longer needed to place bids and that spot prices will "...adjust more gradually, based on longer-term trends in supply and demand.'' The changes made spot instances more similar to the fixed-price transient servers offered by other cloud platforms. Unfortunately, while these changes made spot instances less complex, they eliminated many benefits to sophisticated users in optimizing their applications. This paper provides a retrospective on Amazon's real-time spot market, including its advantages and disadvantages for allocating transient servers compared to current fixed-price approaches. We also discuss some fundamental problems with Amazon's spot market, which we identified in prior work (from 2016), that predicted its eventual end. We then discuss potential options for allocating transient servers that combine the advantages of Amazon's real-time spot market, while also addressing the problems that likely led to its elimination.
Year
DOI
Venue
2019
10.1109/ICCCN.2019.8846933
2019 28th International Conference on Computer Communication and Networks (ICCCN)
Keywords
Field
DocType
Amazon real-time spot market,Amazon real-time computational spot market,fixed-price approaches,allocating transient servers,fixed-price transient servers,spot prices,modern clusters,cloud platforms,cloud applications,dynamic pricing,market-based resource allocation,spot instances,transient cloud servers
Resource management,Spot contract,Computer security,Computer science,Dynamic pricing,Server,Computer network,Resource allocation,Market research,Spot market,Cloud computing
Conference
ISSN
ISBN
Citations 
1095-2055
978-1-7281-1857-4
0
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.34
18
6
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
David E. Irwin189998.12
Prashant J. Shenoy26386521.30
Pradeep Ambati322.06
Prateek Sharma4113.23
Supreeth Shastri500.68
Ahmed Ali-Eldin644224.01