Cost-Effective Spot Instances Provisioning Using Features of Cloud Markets

Cloud Spot Markets

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 to run their applications 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. The price of a spot instance can increase if the demand increases and the number of available instances that can be supported by a finite number of physical resources in a data center of cloud providers decreases. Conversely, the price of this spot instance can decrease if the demand decreases and the number of available instances increases. Therefore, if the customer’s price is greater than the cloud provider’s price that depends on the demand, a spot instance will be provisioned to cloud customers’ applications at the customer’s price. However, when spot instances are already provisioned to cloud customer applications and the cloud provider’s price goes above the customer’s price, the cloud providers will terminate those spot instances within two minutes by sending termination notification signals. As a result, even though cloud customers sometimes rent spot instances at 90% lower prices than on-demand prices (Amazon, 2022), their applications that run on spot instances can be terminated based on price fluctuations that happen frequently; thus, those applications may incur additional overhead related to application completion time and deployment cost from re-executing lost work for each spot instance revocation.

Figure 1.

An overview of a migration mechanism