Application-centric Resource Provisioning for Amazon EC2 Spot Instances

TL;DR

This paper explores application-centric resource provisioning strategies for Amazon EC2 Spot Instances, proposing checkpointing algorithms to enhance reliability and reduce costs amidst their variable availability.

Contribution

It introduces new checkpointing algorithms integrated with application-centric provisioning to improve reliability and cost-efficiency of spot instances.

Findings

Checkpointing schemes significantly increase reliability.

Proposed algorithms reduce overall costs.

Enhanced resource management under variable spot prices.

Abstract

In late 2009, Amazon introduced spot instances to offer their unused resources at lower cost with reduced reliability. Amazon's spot instances allow customers to bid on unused Amazon EC2 capacity and run those instances for as long as their bid exceeds the current spot price. The spot price changes periodically based on supply and demand, and customers whose bids exceed it gain access to the available spot instances. Customers may expect their services at lower cost with spot instances compared to on-demand or reserved. However the reliability is compromised since the instances(IaaS) providing the service(SaaS) may become unavailable at any time without any notice to the customer. Checkpointing and migration schemes are of great use to cope with such situation. In this paper we study various checkpointing schemes that can be used with spot instances. Also we device some algorithms for checkpointing scheme on top of application-centric resource provisioning framework that increase the reliability while reducing the cost significantly.